ZMT - Leibniz Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung

Project Description

The Reimaging Food System (RFS) project has a bold vision to mitigate climate-related risks to food security, human health, and living standards in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, while empowering systemically disadvantaged people to adapt and build resilience.

The project will apply a human rights lens to the development and implementation of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies related to food systems. The ZMT sub-project is looking at those issues in relation to the supply chain of pelagic fish in West Africa. We see more and more of the small pelagic fish going into fish meal/oil (FMFO) globally e.g. in Asia (India), South America (Peru), and West Africa (Senegal & Mauritania).

The FMFO industry has grown substantially in West Africa over the past 50 years with associated carbon footprint of industrial processing and threat to fish food systems by reducing the availability of fish for human consumption. A key focus of the Small Fish Climate Change (SFCC) part of the RFS project, a collaboration between UoM, UiB, & ZMT,  will concentrate on how to redirect small fish from FMFO production - a significant risk to the region's food security - to direct human consumption. Through community assessment approaches and mass balance modelling, the project seeks to understand the institutional, governance and transactional dimension to scale back the FMFO expansion and increased local human consumption and trade system through climate friendly local production.

Through community assessment approaches and mass balance modelling, the project seeks to understand the institutional, governance and transactional dimension to scale back the FMFO expansion and increased local human consumption and trade system through climate friendly local production. The impact of this shift on climate change mitigation will be detectable in the carbon footprint of industrial FMFO processing and fish food systems.