Assessing the carbon footprint of seafood
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Learn how our new tool assesses your products’ carbon footprint and can help drive supply chain transformation.
Our new Seafood Carbon Emissions Profiling Tool (SCEPT) is designed to support industry to understand the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) of their seafood products. It is these GHGs in the atmosphere that are primarily responsible for our warming world.
The SCEPT, designed for businesses in the wild capture and aquaculture sectors, provides an in-depth understanding of the major contributors to the ‘carbon footprint’ of seafood products.
Understanding the carbon footprint of seafood products benefits both industry and end-consumers. For industry, it helps comprehend the existing carbon credentials of their products and identify carbon hotspots, or ‘risks’, in supply chains. This information informs investment decisions and drives improvements. Additionally, conscious consumers seeking to make informed purchasing choices will also find these data valuable.
Our online tool will play a significant role in helping the seafood industry work towards achieving Net-Zero targets by giving businesses the information they need to address carbon emissions within their supply chains.
The new tool can be accessed via the link below and replaces those we previously created and made available.
The secure part of the tool is only available to validated UK seafood businesses by completing a short online end-user request form via the link below:
The tool has been designed and developed to:
- Enable industry to generate carbon footprints for their finished seafood products.
- Build understanding on emissions hotspots, or risks, in product supply chains to drive improvement and help to stimulate pre-competitive supply chain collaboration to potentially lever shared resources and bring scale to address common supply chain challenges.
- Enable businesses to benchmark product carbon footprints against those of their peers.
- Support communications on key reputational messaging on seafood as a low carbon climate-smart food.
- Support business reporting under the GHG Protocol - the world's most widely used GHG accounting standards.
The SCEPT is funded jointly by the Fisheries and Seafood Scheme (FaSS) in England, and Seafish.
Seafish with extensive industry input has created the tool. It has been developed by NutriSciences | Blonk, a leading international expert in food systems sustainability.
The central aim is that the tool will will provide the engine to deliver the seafood sector’s ambitions to decarbonise in line with the Paris Agreement (COP21) – to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
The tool is part of our work to provide practical resources to support the seafood sector’s response to climate change, recognising that business must reduce emissions to contribute to meeting our collective Net-Zero targets and aspirations.
We have received strong and positive UK industry support to align behind one easy to use profiling tool which includes transparency on methodology and consistent measurement capabilities.
Our carbon work started back in 2008; we subsequently developed both an entry level and detailed tool to help the seafood industry build a better understanding of the major contributors to the carbon footprint of seafood products from capture fisheries.
We also worked with the British Standards Institution (BSi), the seafood industry and experts from around the world to establish a common approach for assessing these emissions in seafood products.
This common approach is set out in BSi Publicly Available Specification PAS 2050-2:2012. This is available to download free of charge from the following link:
Find out more about our seafood carbon profiling and climate change work by emailing climate@seafish.co.uk.