Reducing (or eliminating) our consumption of fishes is critical to any vision of sustainability, and we can start by accurately tallying our impact. This new method of measuring sustainability is an improvement in two major ways: it accounts for indirect consumption, and it accounts for international trade.
Photo by zhan zhang on Unsplash
Slowly but surely, it’s becoming common knowledge that commercial fishing is environmentally unfriendly, and many species of fish are threatened by overfishing or are already extinct due to it. To tackle this issue, NGOs and government bodies have been tracking the number of fishes and other sea animals taken from fisheries, and using this to try to determine a “sustainable” level of production.
It’s worth noting upfront that the growth of aquaculture is largely due to our appetite for fishes, which cannot be sated by sustainable wild-catch fisheries. Fish farming is usually cheaper than catching wild fish, and since the animals are purpose-raised in captivity, no wild marine life are threatened (theoretically — in practice, this is not the case) and there is no danger of overfishing.
Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE PDF: The Global Footprint Of Fish Consumption
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