Understanding and managing the overseas impacts of UK food systems transformation
IIED is working with partners to understand, manage and positively influence the overseas impacts of efforts to shift the UK’s food system towards health and sustainability.

Container ship Antwerp Bridge, carrying goods (Photo: Bernard Spragg, NZ, via Flickr, PDM 1.0)
The UK’s food system contributes to climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss – not just at ‘home’, but around the world too. The UK increasingly ‘offshores’ its environmental impacts, including those of its food system. Over a third (PDF) of the greenhouse gas emissions linked to the UK food system are emitted overseas.
There is growing consensus that diets in the UK need to change to improve public health, mitigate climate change and protect nature and wildlife. But the UK currently imports nearly half of the food it consumes, including around 50% of vegetables, 60-80% of seafood and over 80% of fruits.
Efforts to improve aspects of the UK food system could also have trade-offs and unintended consequences. For example, measures to increase transparency and sustainability through certification schemes can sometimes exclude small-scale food producers. This may lead to a loss of livelihoods, reduced consumer choice, and a small number of large companies having more control over the food system.
What is IIED doing?
IIED is exploring the potential overseas impacts of UK food systems transformation and how these could be managed.
As a first step, IIED is looking at the shifting place of aquatic foods – including algae, fish and shellfish – in the UK’s food system. Recent national food strategies in the UK envision a future in which people eat more seafood, including more seafood produced in the UK.
Aquatic foods could play an important role in meeting food and nutrition security while reducing the environmental footprint of diets in the UK. But they are also among the world’s most traded global commodities. Up to 80% of aquatic foods eaten in the UK are imported.
In partnership with other organisations, IIED is exploring the role that aquatic foods might play in the UK’s future food system, and the possible overseas impacts of shifting patterns of consumption, trade and production.
Working with the Marine Conservation Society, we explored different visions for seafood in the UK’s future food system, and raised questions about the trade-offs that these visions might create between public health, environmental sustainability and economic prosperity – in the UK and in other countries.
Together with the Marine Conservation Society and the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London, we convened an expert workshop to explore some of these questions – and discuss how seafood could be better integrated into food systems policy, research and advocacy in the UK.
Work with us
Are you interested in working with us or funding this work? This is an ongoing, exploratory programme of work and we are open to having informal conversations about opportunities to collaborate.
Publications
Additional resources
Bringing aquatic foods into UK food systems debates: workshop report, Christian Reynolds, Giulia Nicolini, Jack Clarke (2024), City, University of London report
Bringing aquatic foods into UK food systems debates: workshop Report – summary, Christian Reynolds, Giulia Nicolini, Jack Clarke (2024), City, University of London report
Sustainable seafood and small-scale fisheries: improving retail procurement, Cristina Pita, Alexander Ford (2023), IIED issue paper
Donors
Irish Aid