Overview

Globalization reshapes human-environmental systems by connecting producers and consumers to distant environments, creating potential trade-offs in the environmental and human wellbeing outcomes. Our research group focuses on the sustainability and food security implications of global seafood trade through three primary tracks of work: 1) trade as a driver of distant environmental impacts; 2) trade risks and resilience to environmental shocks, and 3) social-ecological feedbacks between seafood production and global trade.

A major effort of this lab is improving the resolution global seafood trade data to enable the research below and to improve seafood traceability efforts. See the Aquatic Resource Trade in Species (ARTIS) Database website for more information on this work. 

Distant environmental impacts of food production 

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Global food trade can potentially produce products with lower environmental impacts by sourcing from regions better suited for production, but can also drive environmental change through species introductions and by shifting production to locations with more relaxed environmental regulations. Understanding when and where trade drives negative environmental impacts requires linking global trade data to production and environmental impact data. Our research group is advancing these two areas by:
1. Developing a global species trade network database spanning 1994-2021, and; 
2. Building simplified life cycle assessment models to produce standardized estimates of greenhouse gas emissions, nitrogen and phosphorus emissions, and land and water use across farmed and wild aquatic foods. 
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Trade risks and resilience to environmental shocks

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Resilience describes a system’s ability to respond and adapt in the face of potential disruptions—a key feature to ensuring food security. Environmental variability can disrupt the food production system. Reliable crop production requires temperatures and precipitation within specific ranges. Consequently, heat waves, floods, and droughts can all interrupt crop production. Additionally, El Niño events famously reduce catch in some fisheries. Other natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, can interrupt food production at numerous points in the production and distribution system. The exposure of food systems, and ability to adapt, to such disruptions describes the food system’s overall vulnerability and resilience.

Trade can buffer shocks when it allows countries to source foods from or shift exports to unaffected regions, but it can also expose countries to shocks that propagate through trade networks. Our research group is studying under what conditions seafood production and trade are resilient to shocks and when trade makes national food security at greater risk to external shocks by studying historical cases of shocks, drawing on a range of trade network, price, and contextual data.

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Globalization and social-ecological feedbacks 

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Already nearly one fourth of the world’s food production is internationally traded and this proportion continues to grow. As a result, the feedbacks between food production and the environment are occurring on increasingly large geographic scales.  This is reshaping local food production and consumption systems, with implications for local environmental and human health outcomes. Key research questions within this area of work center on the extent to which these feedbacks reinforce one another and identifying the conditions under which global trade can enable positive environmental and human health outcomes. We are advancing this topic by investigating the structure of trade over time in relation to local environments and through interdisciplinary collaborations disentangling these feedbacks, especially testing for the presence of social-ecological traps in reef-based food systems (see Pacific Planetary Health Initiative for more). 
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