The hidden risk in seafood’s food-security future

Seafood is increasingly being positioned as part of future food-security and protein-resilience strategies, particularly as climate pressure, land constraints and volatility reshape animal agriculture. Yet much of the sector is still assessed through relatively narrow sustainability or emissions frameworks, even as its pressures increasingly overlap with agriculture, water systems and climate resilience. 

New research from the $95 trillion investor network FAIRR suggests the environmental and operational assumptions underpinning that optimism are becoming harder to sustain at industrial scale. In seafood, environmental pressure is becoming difficult to separate from day-to-day operating risk. 

FAIRR recently launched its Coller FAIRR Seafood Index, benchmarking 20 of the world’s largest listed seafood companies on risks ranging from pollution and food safety to labour practices and traceability. The most striking result was not climate disclosure or emissions. It was pollution, where companies scored an average of just 19 out of 100 — the weakest-performing category in the index.

The finding matters because it points to a broader shift underway in sustainable finance. Investors are increasingly asking whether companies can continue scaling production under mounting environmental pressure, rather than simply whether they have climate targets or ESG commitments. 

Pollution as an operational risk

In the seafood industry, such pressures already affect production systems directly. Pollution in aquaculture and industrial seafood production affects the biological systems the industry depends upon.The pressures come from almost every direction: effluent discharge from salmon farms, marine litter from pens and fishing gear, antibiotic leakage, ecosystem degradation and water contamination can all affect harvest conditions, disease exposure and supply stability. 

This is important because the distinction between marine and terrestrial food systems is also becoming harder to sustain operationally. Aquaculture increasingly depends on agricultural inputs, while agricultural runoff simultaneously affects aquatic production systems. 

“Whether it’s IUU fishing, overfishing or issues of disease and pollution management in farmed seafood, it’s clear that there’s a lot of work to do to ensure seafood contributes sustainably to global food security and resilience,” said Max Boucher, head of nature programmes at FAIRR.

Unlike emissions accounting, many ecosystem pressures are highly localised. Disease outbreaks, algal blooms, water contamination and fish mortality do not unfold evenly across sectors or regions, making them harder to capture through standardised disclosure frameworks alone. 

FAIRR’s findings suggest pollution may provide an unusually direct indication of operational resilience because it affects the ecosystems upon which seafood production depends. Poor water quality, disease pressure and contamination risks do not remain environmental issues for long once they start disrupting harvests, permitting or supply stability.

Growth assumptions under pressure

The FAIRR index also suggests the industry is struggling to identify commercially viable pathways beyond its current production model. Companies scored just 11 out of 100 on future-facing opportunities, including protein diversification and unfed aquaculture such as mussels and macroalgae. While some Asian companies, including Umios, Nissui and Thai Union, scored more strongly in this area, most companies remain heavily focused on existing fisheries alongside salmon and shrimp farming.

That matters because the industry is trying to expand production while relying on increasingly stressed ecosystems and feed systems. Previous FAIRR research into salmon farming exposed similar tensions around dependence on fishmeal and fish oil derived from wild-caught fish. In one example, Peru’s cancellation of its anchovy fishing season in 2023 triggered a 107% spike in fish oil prices, while Mowi reported a 70% rise in feed costs between 2021 and 2023 linked to that disruption.

“We are relying on a finite input to fuel infinite growth projections,” Laure Boissat, oceans programme manager at FAIRR, said in a 2025 interview. “That’s not resilience – it’s a recipe for collapse.” The underlying question is whether seafood companies can continue expanding production as the environmental systems they depend on come under greater strain.

Traceability and implementation gaps

Without clearer visibility into sourcing and production conditions, it becomes harder to verify sustainability claims, monitor exposure to illegal fishing or assess how environmental pressures are affecting production systems in practice. FAIRR found companies scored an average of just 27 out of 100 on traceability across wild-caught and farmed seafood, leaving consumers and investors exposed to risks around mislabelling, provenance and potentially illegally caught fish.

The wider issue running through the index is implementation. Companies generally performed better on social risks, including workforce wellbeing and labour issues, but scores dropped sharply when FAIRR assessed implementation, outcomes and environmental preparedness. That gap matters because investors are increasingly trying to understand whether companies can manage volatile production conditions in practice, rather than simply disclose awareness of the risks.

Limits of climate disclosure

Seafood also exposes the limits of climate-focused disclosure frameworks. Emissions targets and net-zero plans reveal relatively little about whether underlying ecosystems remain capable of sustaining current growth projections and expectations.  Seafood production expanded during periods when marine ecosystems were broadly assumed stable enough to support continued growth. Today, increasing disease outbreaks, feed volatility and warming waters are beginning to disrupt those assumptions.

From an operator perspective, the consequences are already tangible. “Red tide events, warming waters, storm damage, and fluctuating salinity directly impact whether product is harvestable at all, not just its cost,” said Lindsay Rosegger, VP and co-founder of Lost Coast Oyster Company. “These factors translate into inconsistent supply, higher insurance and compliance costs, and greater logistical unpredictability – all of which materially affect revenue stability across the seafood value chain.” For investors, that increasingly shifts sustainability from a disclosure issue into an operational one. 

Pricing environmental risk

At the same time, investors are still struggling to quantify many of these risks consistently. “It is difficult to price ecosystem degradation because its impacts are delayed, uneven, and highly localized,” Rosegger said. “The result is a persistent gap between operational reality on the water and how risk is quantified in financial frameworks.”

That gap is becoming increasingly important because seafood exposes a category of risk that traditional ESG and climate frameworks have struggled to model cleanly. Frameworks such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) reflect that wider movement, but seafood demonstrates how difficult implementation becomes once environmental risk is tied directly to biological systems.

Some parts of the sector have already experienced how quickly environmental assumptions can unravel financially. “Losses from investments in Recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) the past few years have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Chris Rawley, CEO of agriculture investment platform Harvest Returns. “These delicate systems require significant up front capital expenditures and have repeatedly failed operationally.”

Rethinking resilience

Seafood is widely expected to play an important role in future food security. The question emerging from FAIRR’s research is whether financial markets, policymakers and the industry itself are still assuming oceans and marine ecosystems will keep absorbing pressure without affecting production costs or supply.

For investors, that distinction increasingly matters because once ecosystem stress begins affecting supply reliability, feed costs, permitting or disease exposure, environmental risk stops sitting outside the business model – it starts shaping the economics of production itself. For sustainable finance, seafood may become an early test of whether markets can move beyond measuring environmental disclosure and start evaluating whether ecosystems under pressure can continue supporting industrial-scale growth.

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