BANGKOK, THAILAND — A collaboration of leading global seafood certification and ratings programmes Thursday released Sustainable Seafood: A Global Benchmark, a first-of-its-kind snapshot of the environmental and social performance of worldwide seafood production. The Certification & Ratings Collaboration, consists of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), Fair Trade USA, Marine Stewardship Council, Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch Program, and the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership. Its report was released at a Seafood Summit 2019 plenary presentation by ASC CEO and Collaboration Chair Chris Ninnes, offering industry, government, and non-governmental organization leaders an overview of key findings.
“To accelerate improvements in the practices of fisheries and aquaculture, industry, governments, and NGOs need to know how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go,” said Ninnes, who also chairs the Collaboration. “For the first time, the member organizations of the Certification & Ratings Collaboration have compiled their individual environmental and social performance data, to provide a comprehensive look at the global landscape.”
The analysis provides a performance overview of all global production, as well as snapshots of wild production and farmed production worldwide. It also includes performance profiles for eight priority seafood sectors: whitefish, small pelagics, shrimp, tuna, farmed salmon, squid and octopus, wild crab, and wild snapper and grouper. Each overview details the proportion of production that has been certified or rated as meeting a high level of performance, improving through fishery or aquaculture improvement projects, needing improvement, or status unknown.
The Collaboration plans to release an online tool, allowing users to display the report’s data interactively. For more information: info@certificationandratings.org.
