Defining Sustainability for Multispecies Fisheries and Challenges in Application of Global Certification and Labeling Schemes

ABSTRACT

Most fisheries in the world do not focus on the capture of only one or two species but harvest multiple species. Multispecies fisheries are challenging to understand and manage, with single species management options often insufficient and/or inappropriate. This paper analyses how two certification schemes, the Marine Stewardship Council and Marin Trust, address multispecies fisheries. These are both global in scope, based on the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries and reference the FAO Guidelines for the Ecolabelling of Fish and Fishery Products from Marine Capture Fisheries among several other global norms relating to fisheries. Both of these schemes were created in the Global North, with a focus on single species fisheries. There are complex interactions between the requirements of international law/agreements/guidance coupled with market‐based claims around sustainable/responsible sourcing which create a series of challenges that remain to be fully resolved, and these are amplified in species‐rich tropical ecosystems. There have been some significant gains in fisheries assessment approaches, ecosystem modelling and ways of thinking about sustainable fisheries from an ecosystem perspective since the FAO's Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management was adopted in 2001. There is a need for a comprehensive update of advice to help better align a growing number of global norms and, with that, some changes to the ways that fishery certification schemes handle complex multispecies fisheries. There would be benefits for updating the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, Sustainable Development Goal 14.4.1 and the FAO Ecolabelling Guidelines (FAO 2009) to ensure that these fisheries are explicitly included in the push for sustainable use. We provide five recommendations that could be considered by both intergovernmental bodies and the scheme owners which could assist better integration of multispecies fisheries into the wider push for sustainable use.