Premium
Mexican Small‐Scale Fisheries Reveal New Insights into Low‐Carbon Seafood and “Climate‐Friendly” Fisheries Management
Author(s) -
Ferrer Erica M.,
Aburto-Oropeza Octavio,
Jiménez-Esquivel Victoria,
Cota-Nieto Juan José,
Mascareñas-Osorio Ismael,
López-Sagástegui Catalina
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
fisheries
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.725
H-Index - 79
eISSN - 1548-8446
pISSN - 0363-2415
DOI - 10.1002/fsh.10597
Subject(s) - carbon footprint , sustainability , scale (ratio) , fishery , greenhouse gas , environmental science , fisheries management , population , ecological footprint , environmental resource management , geography , natural resource economics , fishing , ecology , economics , biology , cartography , environmental health , medicine
As a society, we are confronted with the question of how best to feed an expanding human population, and some have pointed to seafood as a “climate‐friendly” option. To date, the contributions of small‐scale fisheries (SSFs) have been largely excluded from studies on food footprint. Here, we calculated the Emission Intensity profiles for seven seafood types generated by Mexican SSFs. Based on these results—which indicate that there exist several low‐carbon SSFs in Northwestern Mexico—we provide a coarse approximation for the total carbon footprint of Mexico’s motorized small‐scale fleet. Finally, we scrutinize the utility of non‐fuel data (such as GPS data) in predicting fuel consumption/carbon emissions across SSFs. To our knowledge, this is the first life‐cycle assessment to compare multiple seafood products generated by Mexican SSFs, and the first published link between tracking data and carbon accounting for SSFs specifically. We discuss how these results, in combination with insights gained from monitoring efforts in Northwestern Mexico, might be used to inform and incentivize “climate‐friendly” fisheries management. While carbon footprint represents just one component of sustainability, this article serves as a helpful case study for those preoccupied with carbon accounting and fishers sustainability in traditionally data‐limited scenarios.