The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) released its 2023 annual report today, titled Navigating Toward Sustainable Tuna Fisheries, which presents the organization’s accomplishments on the path to more sustainable tuna fisheries — especially through collaboration with tuna vessels, fishers and other partners in the seafood industry.
“Skilled, conscientious fishers in all oceans take proactive steps every day to protect marine life — avoiding overfishing, reducing bycatch and providing data for scientific and compliance reporting — while harvesting their catch. As one indicator of the strides they have made, more than 65 tuna fisheries are certified by the Marine Stewardship Council as meeting its criteria,” Susan Jackson, ISSF President, remarks in the report. “We are grateful to ISSF’s many vessel partners in sustainable fishing — and we celebrate our multi-faceted collaborations with fishers at sea and on shore.”
Navigating Toward Sustainable Tuna Fisheries reviews ISSF’s continued marine research and advocacy efforts to identify and promote best practices in tuna and ocean conservation with fishers, vessels, tuna companies and Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs). The report also covers ISSF’s activities with peer environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and scientific agencies and highlights work to promote verified accountability in sustainability commitments made throughout the tuna supply chain.
Jackson continued, “Since our founding, ISSF has prioritized — and prized — working closely with fishers, vessel owners and the organizations that represent them to better understand their sustainable-fishing challenges, successes and techniques. Nearly two decades later, we are still enthusiastically listening, learning and contributing resources and support.”
Navigating Toward Sustainable Tuna Fisheries Highlights
ISSF’s 2023 annual report includes a feature article on the importance of ISSF’s Vessels in Other Sustainability Initiatives (VOSI) list and other efforts to make electronic monitoring (EM) adoption in all tuna fisheries — regardless of vessel type or ocean region — a reality. Ben Gilmer, Chair of ISSF Environmental Stakeholder Committee and Director of Large-Scale Fisheries, The Nature Conservancy, authors “Tools for Transparency.”
The report also outlines ISSF’s critical science-focused and verification-related efforts with industry partners, including seafood companies and tuna fishing vessels. ISSF accomplishments in 2023 include:
- 35 coordinated research projects on ecosystem impacts, tuna stock health and combatting Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing activities — demonstrating ISSF’s scope of research and impact
- Information exchange and problem-solving between fishers and scientists through 25 in-person purse seine skippers’ workshops with 480+ participants. Also, 1,575 fishers completed ISSF’s Skippers’ Guidebooks to Sustainable Fishing Practices.
- Reaching 1,500+ registrations on the ProActive Vessel Register (PVR) — one of four public vessel lists ISSF provides to foster transparency in tuna fishing. Also, ISSF has more than doubled registrations on its VOSI public vessel list for seafood sourcing to nearly 500 since the list’s October 2020 inception.
- Engagement with 100% of active tuna purse seine fisheries improvement projects (FIPs) and 75% of longline FIPs.
- The release of Continuously Improving Global Tuna Sustainability, ISSF’s 2023-2027 strategic plan
Downloadable infographics and links to related reports and interactive content on the ISSF website are also available throughout the Navigating Toward Sustainable Tuna Fisheries PDF.
ISSF Annual Conservation Measures & ProActive Vessel Register Compliance Report
Navigating Toward Sustainable Tuna Fisheries are findings from the complementary ISSF Annual Conservation Measures & ProActive Vessel Register Compliance Report, which ISSF publishes to coincide with the annual report. In addition to reporting ISSF participating companies’ performance on ISSF conservation measures, the report now also shows PVR vessels’ aggregate compliance on relevant ISSF conservation measures.
For 23 ISSF participating companies as of December 2023, the ISSF Annual Conservation Measures & ProActive Vessel Register Compliance Report shows a conformance rate of 98.95%. It tracks companies’ progress in conforming with ISSF’s 33 conservation measures, such as:
- Demonstrating the ability to trace products from can code or sales invoice to vessel and trip
- Submitting quarterly purchase data by vessel, trip dates, species, size and other data to RFMO scientific bodies
- Transactions only with those longline vessels whose owners have a policy requiring the implementation of best practices for bycatch mitigation of sharks and marine turtles
- Establishing and publishing policies to prohibit shark finning and avoiding transactions with vessels that carry out shark finning
- Conducting transactions only with purse seine vessels whose skippers have received science-based information from ISSF on best practices such as reducing bycatch
- Avoiding transactions with vessels that are on an RFMO IUU fishing list
For PVR-listed vessels, the report shows an aggregate compliance rate of 75.78% with the 12 ISSF conservation measures that directly address vessel activity, including RFMO Participation; Transactions with Vessels that Use Only Non-entangling FADs; Vessel-based FAD Management Policy; and Observer Coverage, for example. Vessel participation in these measures is shown in columns on the PVR.
As part of its commitment to transparency and accountability, ISSF engages third-party auditor MRAG Americas to audit participating companies to assess their compliance with ISSF’s conservation measures. MRAG Americas conducts independent auditing based on a rigorous audit protocol. MRAG Americas also audits the vessels on the PVR for compliance against the ISSF conservation measures that are tracked on the vessel list.
In addition to the summary compliance report, MRAG Americas issues individual reports that detail each participating company’s compliance with ISSF’s conservation measures. ISSF publishes these individual company compliance reports on its website. Individual PVR vessel compliance information can also be found on the PVR list on the ISSF website.
