Securing Biodiversity is Essential to Achieving Food Security

How do we sustainably feed the world? It’s one of the most pressing issues of our time given the enormous pressures placed on natural resources.

In June 2024, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) published its biennial flagship report: the State of the World’s Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA). It laid bare a stark reality of the challenges facing global food security. Already, over 3.1 billion people – more than 40% of the world population – cannot afford a healthy diet, with hunger and malnutrition occurring unevenly across and within continents and countries.

It’s hardly surprising, then, to learn from SOFIA 2024 that aquatic systems – the world’s oceans and inland water bodies – are increasingly recognized as vital for food and nutrition security. But how can this service be secured if demand outstrips supply? What if the act of “harvesting” aquatic foods – through fishing and aquaculture – damages or destroys the ecosystems that nurture it?

Over the past decades we’ve gotten better at finding and catching fish. Despite this, SOFIA shows us that since the late 1980s, global capture fisheries production has fluctuated between 86 and 94 million tonnes per year. The stocks are simply not there in the numbers for our improved techniques to yield greater returns. To make matters worse, the proportion of this production coming from stocks not fished within biologically sustainable limits has been increasing since 1974 when it was 10%, to the current SOFIA 2024 estimates showing 37.7%.