A new Seafood Carbon Emissions Tool can help make even more sustainable seafood choices.

It’s a new year which means new years resolutions. I have a few, the most important being reducing my carbon footprint. Being in the business of conservation I am used to bad news, some of which has kept me up at night. But nothing has kept me up like the October 2018 release of the IPCC report¹. The IPCC report says “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes” are needed “in all aspects of society” if humanity is to contain the average global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The timeframe the IPCC has set for this is just over a decade away.

There’s one simple critical takeaway point from that report: “we need to cut carbon pollution as much as possible, as fast as possible”. Not doing this has clear and imminent risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth. Not doing this will impact my children, your children – not hypothetical future generations but the ones on this earth right now.

And what I know for sure is we are not doing enough – we need to do more. Our governments in particular need to do way more. But even if we make the changes we need to reach the 1.5°C target, our kids’ world will be so different. For example even at 1.5°C, the IPCC estimates that we’ll lose about 80% of coral reefs. That makes me sad, makes me mad, and makes me want to take action.

There are many actions we can take as individuals to reduce our carbon footprint (read this if you think your individual actions don’t matter). Changes to our transportation habits are important ones – fly less, use more public transport. Other key actions relate to our eating habitats. As this article explains, what you eat is a key determinant of your impact on the planet – in particular how we get our protein. Spoiler alert, red meat is the biggest loser.

Seafood lovers, on the other hand, can rejoice. When it comes to climate impacts, most seafood is much better than most terrestrial animal production. But as is the case with terrestrial animal protein, not all marine produced proteins stack up equally when it comes to climate impacts.

Thanks to Seafood Watch and Dalhousie University you can now figure out the climate consequences of eating your favourite seafoods. Their recently released Seafood Carbon Emissions Tool was developed to allow businesses to see the carbon footprint of the seafood, wild or farmed, they purchase and even compare it to land-based protein sources. But as a consumer I find it really useful too.

The tool includes estimates for over 150 combinations of species and gear type or farming method. The measurements are for emissions generated up to the dock where the fish is landed or, for farmed fish, everything that happens at the farm. Because seafood can be transported in many ways and over different distances, the measurements do not include processing or transportation to local markets. Canada’s poor labelling practices mean you may not know where your seafood has come from, but asking will let retailers and restaurants know people care about eating local seafood.

Of course, carbon footprint shouldn’t be the only thing you consider when choosing seafood – the health of our oceans depends on all our actions. It is still important to choose seafood produced from healthy populations and with minimal impacts to habitats and other species. Thankfully Canadians have several options to make sustainable seafood decisions. As it turns out, some of the more environmentally sustainable choices, e.g. small bodied schooling fishes like sardine or mackerel and farmed shellfish like mussels and oysters, are also the most carbon friendly.

I guess achieving my New Years resolution will involve eating more anchovies, sardines and mussels – along with more beans, nuts and seeds. In this way I will be contributing to the health of our planet, and also to my own.

[1] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations, dedicated to providing the world with an objective, scientific view of climate change and its political and economic impacts.