About

James Anderson is a Professor in the Food and Resource Economics Department at the University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. His research has focused on natural resource management, fisheries and aquaculture economics, markets, and international trade. Recent work has concentrated on developing new fisheries performance indicators, modeling fisheries and aquaculture sectors, seafood and food security, and analyzing how the growth of aquaculture and reforms in fisheries management are transforming the global seafood sector in both developed and developing nations. Prior to his tenure at the University of Florida, James Anderson served as the advisor for Oceans, Fisheries and Aquaculture and led the Global Program on Fisheries and Aquaculture at The World Bank. He has also contributed as the editor of the international journal Marine Resource Economics from 1999 to 2010. He holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Davis, a Master’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a Bachelor’s degree in Biology/Economics from the College of William and Mary.

Research topics

• Economics
• Business
• Biology
• Fishery
• Ecology
• Environmental resource management
• Computer Science
• Natural resource economics
• Art
• Agricultural economics
• Chemistry
• Finance
• Food science
• Geography
• Microeconomics

Selected publications

• Aquaculture in the United States: An analysis of seven aquaculture sectors from the aquaculture performance indicators perspective

  Aquaculture Economics & Management · 2025-01-28 · 20 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Environmental impacts and food loss and waste in the U.S. aquatic food system

  Global Environmental Change · 2025-01-19 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  • Aquatic foods vary widely in energy use, GHGe, and blue water use. • All forms of sockeye salmon, frozen Alaska pollock, and canned tuna had the lowest overall environmental impacts. • 22–24% of the energy, GHGe, and blue water in aquatic food systems is lost to food waste. Aquatic food systems support global food and nutrition security, livelihoods, and economies, but put significant environmental pressure on the planet. The United States (U.S.) is the world’s fourth largest consumer and the largest importer of aquatic food, which makes it a good case for studying aquatic food systems. Here, we estimate the energy use, greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe) and blue water use by species, production method, product form, and stage of the U.S. supply chain, while accounting for trade and food loss and waste. We identified wide variation across species for energy use (40.2 to 259.1 MJ/kg), GHGe (3.7 to 22.2 kg CO2 eq/kg), and blue water use (15.8 to 1,851 l/kg). Capture fisheries and aquaculture on average used similar amounts of energy per unit of edible aquatic food; however, aquaculture emitted 54 % more GHGe and consumed 784 % more blue water than capture fisheries, due to the high GHGe and blue water intensity of aquaculture feed. Products with the lowest energy use were canned, fresh, and frozen sockeye salmon, frozen pollock, and frozen catfish. Products with the lowest GHGe were canned, fresh, and frozen sockeye salmon, frozen pollock, canned and frozen tuna, and frozen Atlantic salmon, All wild caught species had significantly lower blue water use impacts than farmed products. The production stage had the largest environmental impacts, but measuring production alone would miss 64 % of the energy, 36 % of the GHGe, and 21 % of the blue water used in the remainder of the supply chain. The processing stage was an important contributor to resource use for species with energy and water efficient production practices. Aquatic food in the U.S. supply is lost and wasted at an overall rate of 23 %; lost and wasted seafood contains 22 % to 24 % of the embodied energy, GHGe, and blue water in aquatic food systems. Compared to findings identified in the literature, aquatic foods in this study were lower in GHGe than beef, had a range of GHGe that extended above and below pork and poultry, and had higher GHGe than most legumes, and nuts. Estimating the environmental impacts and food loss and waste in the U.S. aquatic food system can help identify opportunities to enhance sustainability and resilience and support science communication about lower-impact foods and dietary patterns.

  PublisherDOI

• Indonesia: The Most Overlooked Country in the Global Seafood System

  Reviews in Fisheries Science & Aquaculture · 2025-08-25 · 4 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Introducing the aquaculture performance indicators: A tool to assess the triple bottomline in aquaculture systems

  Aquaculture Economics & Management · 2025-01-07 · 14 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Review of Global Fisheries Performance

  Fish and Fisheries · 2025-02-20 · 4 citations

  reviewOpen access

  ABSTRACT Management of fisheries is complex as it combines environmental, economic and social objectives. The relative importance of these objectives is highly debated and the best approaches to achieving good outcomes are unclear. A lack of global and multi‐dimensional data has largely precluded reviews providing comparisons of performances across systems at a large scale. We review fisheries performance by analysing outcomes over 14 dimensions of environmental, economic and community performance using a unique global dataset for 145 fisheries collected with the Fishery Performance Indicators. The fisheries are ranked into three performance groups by an average of their environmental, economic and community scores: the 10% best fisheries, the 10% worst fisheries and the middle 80%. Furthermore, we investigate how four different types of management systems, catch shares, territorial use rights, limited entry and open access, are represented in the three performance groups. The best performing fisheries scored equally or better and the poorest performing fisheries scored equally or worse in environmental, economic and social dimensions. We found three different management systems to be represented among the best performing fisheries, indicating that no specific management system is best. Moreover, some management systems were represented in all three performance categories, indicating that fisheries characteristics or management designs are important elements of fishery performance. The worst performing fisheries were dominated by open access fisheries with no or very limited management.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An analysis of China’s aquaculture sector for the three pillars of sustainability

  Aquaculture Economics & Management · 2025-01-27 · 7 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Special issue Introduction—Aquaculture performance indicators: A low-cost tool for comparison and evaluation of data-scarce aquaculture sectors around the world

  Aquaculture Economics & Management · 2025-01-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From fjords to factories: The economics of international supply chains and processing of Norwegian Salmon exports

  Aquaculture · 2025-11-04 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Author Correction: Environmental, economic, and social sustainability in aquaculture: the aquaculture performance indicators

  Nature Communications · 2024-07-16 · 14 citations

  erratumOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Application of the food-energy-water nexus to six seafood supply chains: hearing from wild and farmed seafood supply chain actors in the United States, Norway, and Vietnam

  Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems · 2024-01-08 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Introduction The food-energy-water (FEW) nexus highlights the interdependencies between the systems that people rely on for these essential resources. For example, globally, over two thirds of freshwater withdrawals are used to produce food, and another 10% is used during energy generation. In addition, the food system uses one eighth of global net energy. Seafood is a nutritionally important food, and it is critical to use freshwater and energy resources efficiently throughout seafood supply chains to safeguard future supplies and to reduce environmental impacts. Diverse seafood production methods result in highly variable resource use across supply chains, which may contribute to siloed efforts within supply chains to improve efficiency, instead of larger efforts that involve multiple seafood supply chains. Additionally, efforts to develop and implement efficiency strategies must be informed by fishers, aquaculturists, processors, and other seafood supply chain actors to avoid investing time and resources into strategies that will have low uptake. A significant proportion of seafood is imported into the U.S., so engaging with industry and stakeholders in the U.S. and abroad is critical for understanding and improving the FEW nexus associated with seafood consumed by Americans. Methods To understand how resources are being used, current and potential strategies to improve resource use, and relevant motivations and barriers, we conducted 47 semi-structured interviews from 2019 to 2021 with seafood supply chain actors, including producers and processors. Seafood supply chains included were farmed catfish produced in the U.S., farmed pangasius and shrimp produced in Vietnam, farmed Atlantic salmon produced in Norway, and wild-caught sockeye and pink salmon caught in the U.S. Results We provide detailed descriptions of stages within each supply chain regarding resource use and efficiency strategies, and report higher-level findings that apply across supply chains. There was variation across settings regarding how resources are used and opportunities and barriers for improving efficiencies, but we also found commonalities in settings, indicating that resource-saving strategies or innovations could lead to increased efficiency across multiple supply chains. Interviewees shared that cost savings drove past adoption of, and high interest in, energy conservation practices. Generally, direct costs did not motivate reduced use of freshwater, but associated costs like energy to run pumps and supplies to treat contaminated surface water drove interest in reducing water use. Discussion Efforts to improve resource use in the U.S. seafood supply should focus on identifying and scaling-up strategies that (i) involve improved efficiency of more than one resource and/or (ii) apply across multiple settings. This work should involve partnerships between industry, government agencies, and academic researchers, and should be informed by supply chain actors’ experiences and insights. The qualitative insights from this study encompass rich descriptions of FEW-relevant factors at the level of specific supply chain stages as well as findings across six major seafood supply chains in three countries. The study provides an essential complement to existing quantitative characterizations of resource use, and enables nuanced and informed responses to challenges.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Frank Asche

  University of Stavanger

  49 shared

• Taryn Garlock

  Auburn University

  28 shared

• Daniel S. Holland

  Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission

  27 shared

• Claire Wilson

  University of Glasgow

  25 shared

• J. Randall Curtis

  University of Washington

  25 shared

• Anita Lakshmi

  University of Aberdeen

  25 shared

• Brian Greenwood

  London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

  25 shared

• Jeffrey L. Young

  Stanford University

  25 shared

Awards & honors

• editor the international journal of Marine Resource Economic…