Deforestation of mangrove forests, currently occurring at a staggering rate of 150,000 hectares per year, has received scant historical attention from policymakers. This oversight is troubling, given the critical role mangrove forests play in preventing coastal erosion, protecting inland areas from storm surges, filtering water, and providing nursery habitats for numerous fish species. For roughly 4.1 million people, mangroves are a vital source of employment and protein. Moreover, these forests serve as significant blue carbon sinks, capturing carbon at exceptionally high rates.
Southeast Asia has experienced the most severe mangrove losses, with a reduction of 2,457 square kilometers (4.8%) between 1996 and 2020. This decline has been driven largely by aquaculture, particularly shrimp farming, which accounts for 30 percent of coastal land-use change in the region. Similar trends are observed in Central and South America.
Shrimp farming, although not directly targeted by recent regulatory initiatives against deforestation, is now coming under scrutiny due to its environmental and social impacts. The two primary species of farmed shrimp, Penaeus vannamei (Pacific white shrimp) and Penaeus monodon (giant tiger prawn), are often linked to forced labor and poor human rights practices.
Several initiatives have begun to address these issues, including the Seafood Task Force (STF), Seafood Ethics Alliance (SEA), and certification schemes like Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC). These groups focus on shrimp sourcing, feed verification, and labor rights, but ultimately the impact of all of them depend on effective traceability.
Robust science-based tools can empower regulatory initiatives to achieve significant impact. In the United States, the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) requires farm-level data for shrimp imports, including location details. The Trade Enforcement and Trade Facilitation Act of 2015 bans products linked to forced labor, extensively targeting seafood imports. Similarly, the European Union mandates catch certificates for wild-caught products and evaluates traceability systems for shrimp aquaculture. However, without the tools necessary to objectively scrutinize location of production claims, current regulations are vulnerable to mis-declaration and circumvention.
World Forest ID has been funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to explore ways to validate the declared location of farmed shrimp by analyzing chemical features that vary across landscapes, influenced by climatic and environmental factors. Developing extensive reference data to support provenance claims is mainstream in much of the European food sector, where government-supported reference databases and scientific laboratories underpin the credibility of protected origin designations.
Existing evidence suggests that shrimp from different locations exhibit distinct chemical signals, providing a baseline for validating location claims. The most promising techniques for seafood traceability are Stable Isotope Ratio Analysis (SIRA) and Trace Element Analysis (TEA). SIRA measures isotope ratios influenced by environmental and geological factors, while TEA detects chemical elements affected by climatic and anthropogenic factors. Both methods can identify the unique ‘chemical fingerprint’ of shrimp linked to specific locations, with dynamically increased granularity resulting from fusing both sets of data in an AI model. World Forest ID is exploring these methodologies and applications with the ASC in alignment with the ASC Trace Element Fingerprinting project. Our research will be published at the end of 2025, building on work done by WWF.
By developing robust, science-based traceability methods, we can address the environmental and social challenges associated with shrimp farming, ultimately contributing to the preservation of vital mangrove ecosystems and the protection of human rights.
