Can the Japanese seafood industry reconcile their finances with nature?
At a glance, Japans seafood sector is a financial success story. Indeed, between 2010 and 2019, the 70 publicly-listed companies exposed to the sector on the Tokyo Stock Exchange enjoyed both rising profits and share prices. The country also dominates the global industry: you will find more Japanese entities in rankings of the top 100 largest seafood companies in the world than any other nation. For some, however, these signals of a thriving market raise questions. In an environment of declining seafood consumption and production and in a context of overfishing and depleting fish stocks, it is remarkable that Japans seafood sector is increasingly generating revenue. Thinking this contradiction warranted further investigation, at Planet Tracker, we decided to explore exactly why the Japanese seafood industry was reporting such profitability. Our analysis revealed that the apparent financial health of the sector is largely the result of short-term measures to bypass natural constraints. Whats more, we found that these measures are so short-term that they are, in fact, already reaching their limits. In other words, though the financial effects of environmental risks facing the Japanese seafood sector may be currently largely hidden, it will likely not be long until they rise to the surface. Japanese seafood is a striking lever to illustrate how the interplay between financial performance and natural capital can have resounding implications for the real economy of a G7 nation  and how sustainable business practices can be leveraged to expand the indicators which mitigate these risks and buildThis article was originally published on Mongabay  Read the full article on Mongabay