ISSF Publishes 2023 Annual Report Highlighting Collaborative Progress Toward More Sustainable Tuna Fisheries
ISSF has 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.
ISSF Annual Conservation Measures & ProActive Vessel Register Compliance Report
Also highlighted in 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’ aggregate 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 12 ISSF conservation measures that include 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.
