After four years of collaboration between organisations from across Europe, the SEA2SEE project has come to an end, leaving behind a wide range of knowledge, resources and practical experience to support more informed, responsible and sustainable seafood consumption.
To mark the project’s conclusion, the partners met in Faro, Portugal, from 1 to 4 June for the SEA2SEE Final Conference. The event provided an opportunity to present the project’s main achievements and reflect on the lessons learned throughout four years of collaborative work.
Over this period, SUBMON led Work Package 2 (WP2), which focused on consumer engagement and awareness-raising. Through this work, the project designed and implemented a strategy to improve consumers’ knowledge and understanding of seafood, encouraging more responsible purchasing decisions through education, communication and participatory activities.
From understanding barriers to identifying solutions
SEA2SEE began with a simple but fundamental question: what prevents consumers from making more responsible seafood choices?
To answer this question, the project carried out a collective intelligence process in Spain, France, Greece and Portugal, bringing together consumers, seafood sector professionals, researchers and other stakeholders across the seafood value chain. This process identified nine key barriers influencing purchasing decisions:
- Seafood literacy.
- Consumption patterns and behaviour.
- Affordability.
- Ethics.
- The seafood market.
- Seafood sector governance.
- Sustainability.
- Traceability.
- Communication towards consumers.
These findings provided the foundation for the engagement strategy led by SUBMON, which was designed to address the identified barriers and bring responsible seafood consumption closer to the public through a range of awareness-raising, educational and innovation activities.
Visual representation of the main ideas and proposals shared during the participatory workshop held as part of the Ocean Literacy Dialogues at the 2024 Ocean Decade Conference. Illustration by Carlotta Cataldi.
Bringing the sea to the table: four years of public engagement
Building on this strategy, SUBMON coordinated a wide-ranging programme of activities aimed at diverse audiences. These included the development of a MOOC on responsible seafood consumption, the organisation of a Hackathon linked to Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14), the creation of StoryMaps, videos, infographics and other communication materials, as well as workshops, showcookings, visits to fish auctions and markets, conferences and museum activities that brought the realities of the fisheries and aquaculture sectors closer to students, consumers and professionals.
The collaboration with the Escola Blava – Pérez Sala community provides a particularly representative example of how the different dimensions of engagement identified throughout SEA2SEE can be successfully integrated into the school curriculum. Through a sequence of activities and hands-on experiences, students, teachers and families progressively broadened their understanding of seafood from environmental, cultural and social perspectives. The experience demonstrated that educational approaches based on experiential learning are especially effective in addressing the barriers associated with responsible seafood consumption by combining education, storytelling, gastronomy and wellbeing within authentic learning environments.
Animated video summarising some of the activities carried out by Escola Blava Pérez Sala.
After four years of implementation, the evaluation of these activities confirmed many of the project’s initial assumptions and provided valuable insights into how to engage the public in more responsible seafood consumption. The results showed that information alone is not enough: creating lasting engagement requires a combination of education, meaningful experiences, participation and accessible tools.
Lessons for promoting responsible seafood consumption
SEA2SEE has shown that people understand sustainability more effectively when they experience it rather than simply hearing about it. The participatory activities carried out throughout the project demonstrated that visits, showcookings, tasting sessions and workshops foster deeper engagement by connecting people with seafood and with those involved throughout its value chain. Curiosity, flavour and first-hand experiences therefore become powerful drivers of more informed and responsible consumption.
Students, families and teachers from Escola Blava Pérez Sala had the unique opportunity to witness a live fish auction, experiencing first-hand the commercial side of the fishing sector. Photo credits: SUBMON.
One of the key lessons from the project is that transparency and traceability only help build trust when the information is clear, easy to access and genuinely useful for consumers. Throughout SEA2SEE, the partners observed growing public interest in understanding where seafood comes from, how it is produced and what makes one choice more sustainable than another. At the same time, the project highlighted that overly technical information can itself become a barrier. Presenting these topics through visual resources, practical examples and relatable stories makes complex concepts easier to understand and helps consumers translate them into everyday purchasing decisions.
SEA2SEE also demonstrated the value of participation and co-creation as effective ways of engaging the public. By involving consumers and other stakeholders from across the seafood value chain from the earliest stages of the project, the partners were able to design activities that better reflected real needs, strengthened trust and encouraged greater commitment to responsible seafood consumption.
The project also highlighted that accessibility and inclusion should be embedded in the design of any awareness-raising initiative. Considering the diversity of audiences, adapting activities to different needs and incorporating a gender perspective helped broaden participation and create richer, more inclusive learning experiences.
SEA2SEE’s legacy: the “Big 6 of Engagement”
These lessons are reflected in the project’s Big 6 of Engagement: six factors that consistently emerged in the activities that generated the highest levels of interest and participation:
- Stories
- Experiences
- Taste
- Practical knowledge
- Affordability
- Accessibility
The illustration summarises the SEA2SEE journey, from identifying the barriers to responsible seafood consumption to defining the Big 6 of Engagement, six factors identified throughout the project that help foster greater public engagement. Illustration by Carlotta Cataldi.
Together, these six factors demonstrate that connecting with the public and encouraging changes in consumption habits requires far more than simply providing information. The most effective initiatives are those that combine knowledge, experiences, emotions and enabling conditions that help transform information into action.
Although SEA2SEE officially comes to an end this summer, the knowledge generated over the past four years will continue to inspire new initiatives that promote a more conscious relationship with the ocean and the food that reaches our tables. As the project has shown, encouraging responsible seafood consumption is not simply about providing more information, but about making that information understandable, relevant and meaningful in people’s everyday lives.
