Can Cybernetic Twins Function as Regulators for Sustainable (Sea)Food Systems?

Feeding the growing global population without permanently overshooting local-to-planetary boundaries demands a transition from conventional resource extraction to holistic models. Current digital twin applications in (sea)food systems primarily emphasize predictive monitoring and decision support, whereas their integration with heterogeneous socio-economic-ecological systems (SEES) remains incomplete. However, it remains unknown whether a proposed cybernetic architecture can simultaneously support SEES-level properties (e.g., sustainability, stability, dynamism, and circularity) by bridging asynchronous global supply–demand chains through recursive spatiotemporal feedback. This conceptual Perspective proposes a cybernetic twin—defined as the recursive coupling of a SEES and its digital counterpart via bidirectional state, information, and control exchanges—across seven interacting phases of the global (sea)food continuum at multiple spatiotemporal resolutions. The architecture could couple ecosystem dynamics with data assimilation, mechanistic and data-driven prediction, decision analysis, bounded intervention, and feedback-based model updating across aquatic–terrestrial food systems. We propose this cybernetic twin as a framework for testing whether such coupling can improve sustainable (sea)food quantity and quality.