Identifying risks in the flow of nutrition from aquatic foods in vulnerable coastal and islands states in the face of a changing climate

Climate change will have major impacts on Earth’s food systems, and society’s capacity to mitigate the effects hinges on an early understanding of how different systems are affected. Around the world many communities are heavily reliant on marine resources and have few other options.

A key question is therefore how the distribution and access to important nutrients from aquatic foods will be affected by climate change.

The proposed project aims to investigate this by 1) compiling data on fish, habitats, environmental variables, fishing pressure, nutrient content and food web dynamics for the study areas, 2) model species distributions applying two conceptually different approaches (ensembles of advanced statistical models, and dynamic bioclimate envelope models) and 4) produce maps of current and future distributions of aquatic species and their nutrient content.

The end product will be predictive maps of how species distribution and “nutrient-scapes” may change as a consequence of climate change, from today to 2050.

The 3-year project is a collaboration between the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, WorldFish, and the Tanzania Fisheries Research Institute and will be conducted in Tanzania, Timor-Leste, and Solomon Islands, highly dependent on nutritious aquatic food.

The outputs of the project are valuable in order to mitigate climate change impact on local coastal communities, and methods are also expected to be useful for identifying risks in other coastal states