Sustainably managed fisheries provide a safeguard against global food insecurity

Thanks to the pandemic, we know just how quickly food can disappear from supermarket shelves. But it is hard to gauge the vulnerability of our food production system as a whole to abrupt changes, such as those that could be caused by extreme events such as a nuclear war or massive volcanic eruptions. New research shows that, under abrupt shocks to the food system, oceanic fish stocks could partially offset the loss of land-based agricultural production and provide an important source of animal protein for the planet. But only if the wild-capture fisheries were rebuilt and sustainably managed beforehand. These findings were recently published by an international team of researchers including McGill University, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), and University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, in the journal PNAS . "Going into this work, we knew that strengthening regulations to prevent overfishing would ensure higher catch, higher profit and higher resilience of ecosystems to climate change in normal times," said Eric Galbraith of Earth and Planetary Science at McGill, and one of the authors of the study. "What we found was that effective fisheries management automatically builds a surprisingly large backup supply of edible fish in the sea, at no additional cost.