ExCASES mission: What’s the Catch: Investigating the challenges and opportunities for increasing domestic consumption of UK-caught seafood

Research team

Claire Collins (Project Lead) – National Trust

Siobhan Vye (Project Lead) – National Trust

Sicily Fiennes – National Trust

David Bavin – National Trust

Bryony Aitchison – National Trust

Matthew Heard – National Trust

Sarah Crowley – University of Exeter

Theme

ExCASES missions provide short, intense periods of focus towards issues communicated as priorities for RENEW partner organisations and external stakeholders. The ExCASES team work collaboratively with people across different sectors and disciplines, co-designing research and participatory processes to generate empowering outcomes for people and the environment. 

Aims

This mission looks to understand whether a shift in UK domestic seafood consumption – from imported seafood to more UK-caught seafood – would generate ecological, social, economic and cultural impacts. It aims to identify whether there is any evidence to answer this question and understand whether existing mechanisms of change (e.g. seafood certification) could drive this shift.

The work aims to do the following:

• Describe the current state of UK domestic seafood consumption and the key factors driving it;
• Describe the potential climate, ecological, economic and social impacts of a change to more flexible, domestic seafood consumption;
• Identify the current adaptations that are facilitating a change and the associated challenges and opportunities;
• Assess overall feasibility of creating a change through adaptations including shared challenges and recommendations for creating an enabling environment.

Approach

Adopting an iterative approach, this mission first conducted informal scoping conversations with the fishing industry, academia, policymakers and eNGOs to collect exploratory data to help refine research questions, as well as identify potentially important adaptation types. Following this, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 individuals that represented key stakeholder groups and were engaged in work relating to key themes that emerged out of the scoping conversations. These data were analysed to identify key themes relating to the research questions which were then contextualised within a broader systems context using secondary data and literature. The main findings of this analysis are now being used to construct a narrative for a short film that is intended to raise awareness as well as describe project findings.

Next Steps

Analysis is ongoing for this project, with a short report expected to be published later in 2026 along with the project film, which will be shared online.

Outputs

Outputs will be linked here once published.