052: Seafood trade accounting, Covid impacts, and resilient food systems with Jessica Gephart

In this episode Michael and Stefan spoke with Jessica Gephart, an assistant professor of environmental science at American University. Jessica's research focuses on the feedbacks between globalized food systems and the environment, with an emphasis on seafood systems. Jessica, Stefan and Michael spoke about work she has done in trying to improve our accounting of seafood trade flows in order to better understand just where our seafood is going to and coming from, and why this is important to understand from an environmental sustainability perspective. They also talked about more recent work that Jessica has been doing to examine the impacts of the COVID pandemic on the seafood sector, and her professional identity as an interdisciplinary scholar focusing on applied social-ecological challenges.

Jessica's website: http://www.jessicagephart.com/

Paper from PNAS that is discussed:

Gephart, Jessica A., Halley E. Froehlich, and Trevor A. Branch. 2019. “Opinion: To Create Sustainable Seafood Industries, the United States Needs a Better Accounting of Imports and Exports.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116 (19): 9142–46. 

Footnote: We want to highlight a correction to the following statistics from what is stated in the interview. 90% of aquaculture production is produced by 10 countries, while 45 species make up 90% of aquaculture production.