Background

The advent of large-scale industrial fishing, growing human population, poor governance and management, and significant technological improvements have collectively resulted in the overexploitation and depletion of many fish stocks. Climate change has also introduced a battery of new threats that put the health of our oceans—and therefore the ecological, economic, and social benefits we derive from them—at risk. At the same time, increasing population growth poses food security demands for healthy, sustainable protein sources. 

Aquaculture has grown substantially to help meet this need and may have relieved pressure on some wild stocks, but overfishing, destructive aquaculture practices, and poor ocean health continues in much of the ocean.  One radical approach to curbing overfishing and restoring marine ecosystems, while also addressing food security, is to develop cell-based seafood products. These products offer a potential new market alternative that is sustainably produced, scalable to nearly any size, and - could serve as a market substitute to wild caught and farmed fish. 

​What is cell-based seafood?

Cell-based seafood goes by many names (cellular aquaculture, clean seafood, lab-grown seafood, cultivated seafood) but the basic concept is to produce seafood from fish cell- and tissue-cultures. It's not quite the Impossible Burger of the Sea but instead, according to NPR, “it’s seafood without the sea.” For those interested in the cell-based meat production process, check out this Clean Meat Production 101 article developed by the Good Food Institute. 
​
There are currently 5 companies – BlueNalu, Finless Foods, Shiok Meats, Wild Type, and Avant Meats – working on developing a variety of cell-based seafood products, from bluefin tuna to shrimp. Production is still in its nascent stage but has been drawing attention, and funding, for its promise to deliver sustainable protein that is not as environmentally destructive as its conventional counterpart.

Rubio et al. 2019. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.

​Our approach

Recent advances in the field of cellular agriculture have demonstrated the large environmental benefits that could be generated if a portion of industrially farmed and processed meat is replaced by cultured meat substitutes. However, for the newly emerging cell-based seafood industry, a major problem is that we do not understand the ecological and economic impacts of this industry on wild-caught and aquaculture products and if cell-based seafood will have conservation benefits. 

In this project, our team – The Environmental Market Solutions Lab (emLab) and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) – will fill this gap by asking under what conditions cell-based seafood will have a conservation benefit on our oceans. To tackle this question, we are pursuing four interrelated research tracks aimed at identifying the key economic, ecological, social, and political conditions under which innovations in cell-based seafood could drive an ocean conservation benefit. More about our research tracks​ here. ​