Assessing the carbon footprint of seafood
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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 trap heat and are raising the Earth’s surface temperature.
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.
To reduce the GHGs associated with seafood products, businesses need to first identify and understand their carbon ‘footprint’. Seafood products tend to have several ‘hotspots’, or risks, across the supply chain – activities that produce relatively more GHG emissions.
But by inputting robust data and information into our tool, businesses can plan and make informed investment decisions to drive supply chain transformation.
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 specific supply chains.
The new tool replaces those we previously created and made available. The secure part of the tool is only available to seafood businesses by completing a short online end-user request form:
Please note: This resource is subject to further beta-testing and refinement.
The complete tool, including a public facing area, will be available from May 3 2024.
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 and highly nutritious food.
- Support business reporting under the GHG Protocol - the world's most widely used GHG accounting standards.
The SCEPT is supported with additional funding from the Fisheries and Seafood Scheme for England.
It has been developed by Blonk Sustainability Tools, a leading international environmental foot-printing software developer and data/methodology specialist.
The SCEPT 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.