Climate change and impact on critical contaminants and lipids in Arctic Seafood.

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2021

End date

12/31/2026

Budget

1,537,500 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

Food from the ocean will become even more important in the years to come as the world human population is projected to reach over 10 billion people by 2050. Already, the climate changes are affecting us globally and locally. One of the goals for the ocean decade is to resolve the link between climate and safe and healthy seafood. The main aim of CLIMESEAFOOD is to develop new ecosystem models that can advance the process understanding of how a rapidly changing climate is impacting contaminant transport dynamics in the Barents Sea marine ecosystems and relevant seafood. With the new marine ecosystem models, it will be possible to predict how critical contaminants such as PCB and mercury will be affected by different climate scenarios. The project will also contribute to the generic process-based understanding of how contaminants is being transferred from low trophic organisms to organisms high in the food web. In addition, we will get a very detailed description of the lipid chemistry of marine organisms. A novel data bank will be established administered by the Norwegian Marine Data Centre for making historic data on lipid biochemistry, stable isotopes and persistent organic pollutants from different species and trophic levels, areas and years. Besides the effects of climate change on the contaminant fate and transport dynamics, the project will also investigate how high latitude marine ecosystems’ respond to changing environmental conditions by using state of the art “omics” tools. Finally, a risk assessment of future seafood in different climate and fisheries management scenarios will be performed using rodent models. The project will provide a unique knowledge platform for future ecosystem and seafood risk assessments.