The fragmented landscape of shrimp life cycle assessments

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Alena Calvo
25th February 2026
2 minutes read

 

We often hear claims about the environmental impacts of products – ever wondered how the metrics for these come about? Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the most common and standardised environmental impact evaluation. After systematically reviewing 16 peer-reviewed LCAs covering 37 shrimp aquaculture cycles, we found a fragmented landscape where the numbers don’t always reflect reality.

Our three key takeaways are:

1. Methodology skews reality: Reported impacts vary by more than fifty-fold across key categories. We found that methodological choices result in larger differences in global warming estimates for identical farm data than the actual differences in farming practices.

2. Analytical blind spots exist: This methodological dominance is amplified because most studies systematically neglect critical environmental pressures. Crucial factors like land-use change (including mangrove deforestation), biodiversity loss, and antibiotic use are often entirely left out of the equation, despite being key concerns of the sector.

3. Transparency is lacking: Out of the 16 studies we reviewed, only five provided sufficient data that would allow for reproducibility, and therefore, harmonisation with the same methodology.

If LCAs are going to be the standard for policymaking and sustainability transitions, we have to tackle these gaps. We recommend transparent reporting via open-access platforms like HESTIA. This provides consistent background data and models, enabling researchers and farmers to accurately benchmark performances against other systems and products, and ultimately identify true resource efficiencies and sustainable food systems.

This graphic maps the real-world environmental challenges of shrimp farming against the impact categories used to measure them. The lines connect activities to resulting environmental impacts. The blue shading reveals how many of the 16 reviewed studies actually assessed each category.

Read the full open-access paper in Reviews in Aquaculture: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/raq.70132 

A big thank you to my supervisors and co-authors Patrik Henriksson, E.J. Milner-Gulland, Henry Travers, and Joseph Poore, as well as our financial supporters (WorldFish via the CGIAR Trust Fund, Login5 Foundation, and the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, among others), ICCS, the Department of Biology and the Oxford Martin School.

Author

Alena Calvo | DPhil Student
 From a young age, I have been interested in food and how our food choices have an impact on animals, people and the environment. After pursuing an undergraduate degree with a focus on international development and ideology, I decided to expand my horizon and did an internship with a nutrition project in Malawi followed by travels in Southern and Eastern Africa as well as Central and South America. With these impressions, I then began a graduate degree in human development and food security and researched the downstream impacts of high seas fishing on developing nations as part of the Common Oceans Tuna Project of FAO for my thesis. I then worked in a development project in Mauritania for almost three years where our aim was to improve the food security through sustainable small-scale fisheries. This experience has shown me even more how interlinked small-scale producers and global developments are – and how little power small-scale producers have in this process. I hence decided to investigate this further with my DPhil project and contribute to a more environmentally and socially sustainable food system.
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