The environmental impact of the consumption of fishery and aquaculture products in France

In the context of climate change, diet is a key driver of environmental impacts. Previous research has emphasized the environmental benefit of increasing consumption of fishery and aquaculture products (FAPs) in Europe. However, increasing the proportion of FAPs in consumer diets could also lead to a transfer of environmental damage from earth to sea. It is thus important to evaluate the environmental impacts of FAPs on marine ecosystems globally. For that purpose, an original database characterizing the origin of FAPs consumed in France has been constructed, and matched to indicators of environmental impact. Use of the database revealed that the FAPs in the French diets (1.7 Mt live weight) had a corresponding primary production required (PPR) worth 1252 Mt, with an impact per ton of product live weight worth 2622 kg CO2 eq. for climate change, 18 kg PO43−eq. for eutrophication, and 26,604 MJ for energy use. Some heterogeneity across species was found, implying that the species composition of the FAPS consumed had a strong influence on environmental footprint. Furthermore, production methods also substantially affect global impact. The results show that, among FAPS consumed in France, trawled crustaceans and farmed shrimps or prawns are the greatest contributors to global warming (27,800 and 13,344 kg CO2 eq. per ton live weight, respectively), despite good performances regarding trophic level based ecosystem indicators (a PPR of 3 and 9 Mt respectively). Shellfish register the smallest footprint both globally and at ecosystem level (545 kg CO2 eq., 1 kg PO43− eq., 10,414 MJ, and a PPR of 5 Mt per ton live weight). Our result suggest that, to avoid a transfer of environmental burden from land to sea, policies aimed at promoting consumption of FAPs in European diets should be refined to take account of differential impacts across species, origin and production methods of those FAPs.