Eat a fish, save a rainforest? New fisheries paper worth a read

Dear fellow fisheries enthusiast,

I wrote to you earlier in the year about David Attenborough’s latest film and why sustainable seafood is an important part of a thriving planet.

Our latest blog is a relevant follow-up. It covers a recent paper out in Reviews in Fisheries Science & Aquaculture that puts seafood’s role in the global food system into clearer context.

Leadbitter et al. 2025 calculates that replacing wild-caught seafood protein with the current mix of livestock protein would cost the Earth roughly 5 million km² in land, about the size of the Amazon rainforest, an apt comparison since most land cleared for food comes from tropical forests.  

Any kind of policy that reduces seafood supply should consider the counterfactual of where will replacement protein come from? The answer is, most likely, from other forms of animal protein (there’s more data on this and protein demand in the blog).

Maximizing the amount of sustainable seafood harvested from the ocean could provide an additional 16 million metric tons of seafood: according to the calculations in Leadbitter et al. 2025, that would equal more than 1 million km² of land protected from livestock expansion.

As my colleague Ray Hilborn likes to say, “eat a fish, save a rainforest.”

Read the blog here: Science shows sustainable seafood protects rainforests and biodiversity

All the best,

Max