Will London Serve Only Sustainable Fish With Its Chips?

When the 2012 Olympic Games come to London, the city is going to be serving a lot of fish and chips. And one organization has challenged the city to get every last serving of it from sustainable sources.

Launched this week, the Sustainable Fish City initiative aims to get everyone in the city, from fish and chips shacks to top-end restaurants, schools and grocery stores, serving responsibly sourced seafood by 2012. It's an ambitious goal, but the movement has gathered a lot of support over the past two years, and organizers hope to use the international spotlight of the Olympics to keep their momentum going.

Sustainable seafood is generally considered to be seafood that is harvested below its natural replacement rate. A recent study showed U.K. fishery stocks declined by 94 percent over the course of the 20th century. Fishery and sustainability activists say that if the industry doesn't stop overfishing some species, traditional dishes like fish and chips could become a scarce luxury.

Originally, the organizers planned to focus just on seafood that would be served at the Olympics. But since that project had already been conceived on such a grand scale, they decided they may as well expand it.

"We though after that if we can do it there surely we can do it in the whole city," Sustainable Fish City coordinator Jon Walker told AOL News.

They've garnered significant institutional support, including that of five top London universities, hospitals, restaurant chains, caterers and even the police. Eight out of the 33 school boroughs in the city serve only sustainable seafood.

One organization whose support Walker is particularly proud of is historic preservation society The National Trust -- for it, the need to look after the nation's historic heritage mirrors the need to look after its oceans.

"The National Trust is a charity that looks after our special places, so the need to support our oceans and the life they support is very clear to us," the group said in a statement.

Still, people eat a lot of fish in England -- about 1 billion pounds, according to Sustainable Fish City. The city's considerable appetite for seafood is partially to blame for the situation fish stocks find themselves in now, and Londoners aren't exactly going to stop eating fish and chips. Meeting current demand with more responsibly sourced products will mean that consumers will have to venture away from the big four -- salmon, haddock, tuna and cod -- and start eating some less-stressed fish.

Similar efforts in the U.S. are aimed at getting consumers to broaden their horizons beyond those top-level predators that sushi restaurants favor. Florida marine conservationists have been pushing a program to get consumers to eat the ubiquitous lionfish. Some chefs in Great Lakes states are trying to turn a ravenous alien invader, the Asian carp, into a local staple.

If it succeeds, Sustainable Fish City will dwarf other attempts at large-scale sustainable seafood buying. The organizers hope to could the momentum gained with the run-up to the Olympic Games to bring similar programs to the rest of the country, as well as cities around the world.

"Everyone knows that this is a problem that we've got to fix now," Walker said. "There's a general consensus across responsibility industry that this needs to be done. If they haven't got there yet, they want to work with it."