As a society, we are confronted with the question of how best to feed an expanding human population, and some have pointed to seafood as a “climate-friendly” option. To date, the contributions of small-scale fisheries (SSFs) have been largely excluded from studies on food footprint. Here, we calculated the Emission Intensity profiles for seven seafood types generated by Mexican SSFs. Based on these results—which indicate that there exist several low-carbon SSFs in Northwestern Mexico—we provide a coarse approximation for the total carbon footprint of Mexico’s motorized small-scale fleet. Finally, we scrutinize the utility of non-fuel data (such as GPS data) in predicting fuel consumption/carbon emissions across SSFs. To our knowledge, this is the first life-cycle assessment to compare multiple seafood products generated by Mexican SSFs, and the first published link between tracking data and carbon accounting for SSFs specifically. We discuss how these results, in combination with insights gained from monitoring efforts in Northwestern Mexico, might be used to inform and incentivize “climate-friendly” fisheries management. While carbon footprint represents just one component of sustainability, this article serves as a helpful case study for those preoccupied with carbon accounting and fishers sustainability in traditionally data-limited scenarios.

中文翻译：

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墨西哥小规模渔业揭示了低碳海鲜和“气候友好型”渔业管理的新见解

作为一个社会，我们面临着如何最好地养活不断增长的人口的问题，有些人指出海鲜是“气候友好”的选择。迄今为止，小规模渔业（SSF）的贡献在很大程度上被排除在食物足迹研究之外。在这里，我们计算了墨西哥 SSF 产生的七种海鲜类型的排放强度分布。基于这些结果（表明墨西哥西北部存在多个低碳 SSF），我们提供了墨西哥小型机动船队总碳足迹的粗略近似值。最后，我们仔细研究了非燃料数据（例如 GPS 数据）在预测跨 SSF 的燃料消耗/碳排放方面的效用。据我们所知，这是第一次比较墨西哥小规模渔业生产的多种海产品的生命周期评估，以及第一个发布的跟踪数据和 SSF 碳核算之间的链接。我们讨论了如何将这些结果与从墨西哥西北部监测工作中获得的见解相结合，为“气候友好型”渔业管理提供信息和激励。虽然碳足迹仅代表可持续性的一个组成部分，但本文可为那些专注于传统数据有限情景中的碳核算和渔民可持续性的人提供有用的案例研究。