Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 916

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 36 of the 36 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The future of food from the sea

Open access
Costello, Christopher, Cao, Ling, Gelcich, Stefan, Cisneros-Mata, Miguel Á., Free, Christopher M., Froehlich, Halley E., Golden, Christopher D., Ishimura, Gakushi, Maier, Jason, Macadam-Somer, Ilan, Mangin, Tracey, Melnychuk, Michael C., Miyahara, Masanori, de Moor, Carryn L., Naylor, Rosamond, Nøstbakken, Linda, Ojea, Elena, O’Reilly, Erin, Parma, Ana M., Plantinga, Andrew J., Thilsted, Shakuntala H., Lubchenco, Jane·2020·Nature

Abstract

Global food demand is rising, and serious questions remain about whether supply can increase sustainably1. Land-based expansion is possible but may exacerbate climate change and biodiversity loss, and compromise the delivery of other ecosystem services2–6. As food from the sea represents only 17% of the current production of edible meat, we ask how much food we can expect the ocean to sustainably produce by 2050. Here we examine the main food-producing sectors in the ocean—wild fisheries, finfish mariculture and bivalve mariculture—to estimate ‘sustainable supply curves’ that account for ecological, economic, regulatory and technological constraints. We overlay these supply curves with demand scenarios to estimate future seafood production. We find that under our estimated demand shifts and supply scenarios (which account for policy reform and technology improvements), edible food from the sea could increase by 21–44 million tonnes by 2050, a 36–74% increase compared to current yields. This represents 12–25% of the estimated increase in all meat needed to feed 9.8 billion people by 2050. Increases in all three sectors are likely, but are most pronounced for mariculture. Whether these production potentials are realized sustainably will depend on factors such as policy reforms, technological innovation and the extent of future shifts in demand. Modelled supply curves show that, with policy reform and technological innovation, the production of food from the sea may increase sustainably, perhaps supplying 25% of the increase in demand for meat products by 2050.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/s41586-020-2616-y

Cites

36 of 36 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 36 references

Cited by

See all 916

Metadata

Authors
Costello, C., Cao, L., Gelcich, S., Cisneros-Mata, M. Á., Free, C. M., Froehlich, H. E., Golden, C. D., Ishimura, G., Maier, J., Macadam-Somer, I., Mangin, T., Melnychuk, M. C., Miyahara, M., de Moor, C. L., Naylor, R., Nøstbakken, L., Ojea, E., O’Reilly, E., Parma, A. M., Plantinga, A. J., Thilsted, S. H., & Lubchenco, J.
Venue
Nature
Published
2020-08-19
Volume
588
Issue
7836
Pages
95-100
ISSN
  • 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
  • 1476-4687
OpenAlex
W3072837421
Cited by
916
References
36
FWCI
60.30
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The future of food from the sea. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/s41586-020-2616-y
The paper
Costello, C., Cao, L., Gelcich, S., Cisneros-Mata, M. Á., Free, C. M., Froehlich, H. E., Golden, C. D., Ishimura, G., Maier, J., Macadam-Somer, I., Mangin, T., Melnychuk, M. C., Miyahara, M., de Moor, C. L., Naylor, R., Nøstbakken, L., Ojea, E., O’Reilly, E., Parma, A. M., . . . Lubchenco, J. (2020). The future of food from the sea. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2616-y

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.