Assessment of MSC-certified fish stocks in the Northeast Atlantic
Introduction
Status and exploitation level of seafood varies widely, even between different populations of the same species. Consumers who want to make a responsible choice when buying seafood therefore need guidance, such as provided by ecolabels. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) provides a widespread ecolabel and sets and maintains standards for sustainable fishing based on three core principles, namely: 1) sustainable target fish stocks; 2) environmental impact of fishing; and 3) effective management [1]. Principle 1 entails that “A fishery must be conducted in a manner that does not lead to over-fishing or depletion of the exploited populations and, for those populations that are depleted, the fishery must be conducted in a manner that demonstrably leads to their recovery”. More generally, for an exploited population (=stock) to be in sustainable good status, the stock must be sufficiently large and the fishing pressure must be below the maximum sustainable level. The European Union has recently reformed its Common Fisheries Policy [2], basically implementing in regional law the binding obligations provided by the Law of the Sea [3] and by the United Nations Fish Stock Agreement [4]. The new European policy requires that “exploitation of living marine biological resources restores and maintains populations of harvested species above levels which can produce the maximum sustainable yield” [2, Article 2]. This goal can only be reached if fishing pressure is reduced below the rate of fishing mortality (F) corresponding to the maximum sustainable yield (Fmsy).
This study examines relative biomass and fishing pressure for 31 northern European stocks which are targeted by MSC-certified fisheries and which are referred to as MSC certified stocks in the remainder of this text. The study aims to answer the following questions: (i) has fishing pressure (F) decreased after certification? (ii) is current fishing pressure below the one which can produce the maximum sustainable yield (Fmsy)? (iii) has stock size grown after certification? (iv) Is the current stock size (B) above the one which can produce the maximum sustainable yield (Bmsy)? (v) has management set realistic and precautionary levels of total allowable catches (TACs)? (vi) have TACs been enforced and/or obeyed by the fisheries?
Section snippets
Material and methods
Information on MSC-certified fisheries was obtained from www.msc.org in September 2015. Data on stock size and fishing pressure were extracted from official advice documents available in September 2015 at www.ices.dk. For the purpose of this study, all 31 stocks assessed by the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) and targeted by MSC-certified fisheries were analyzed. The year that the first fishery on a stock was certified was used as start-year for the evaluation. The
Results
Of the 31 northern European stocks with MSC-certified fisheries, three stocks (ane-bisc, her-2224, nep-3-4) were certified in 2015 and were therefore only used for the analysis of biomass at the beginning of the certification period. For the remaining 28 stocks, the period of certification was from 1 to 10 years, with a mean duration of 3.9 years (Table 1).
In the first year of certification, 52% of the stocks were subject to overfishing (F>Fmsy), 16% were outside of safe biological limits (B<Bpa
Discussion
There are quite a number of critical assessments of the criteria and procedures used by MSC to certify seafood [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22]. Staff and advisors of MSC have responded to previous critical assessments of certified stocks [e.g. [11], [12] by claiming that the methods used were different from those used in the official stock assessments [23], [24]. This study therefore restricted its analysis to the official ICES stock assessment data
Conclusions
This study examined the status and exploitation level of northern European stocks targeted by MSC-certified fisheries. In the first year of certification, about half of the stocks with available data were exploited above the maximum sustainable level and four stocks were outside of safe biological limits. In the last certified year, 44% of the stocks were subject to overfishing and five stocks were outside of safe biological limits. Thus, after a duration of certification of one to ten years,
Acknowledgments
This study was funded in part by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety on behalf of the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (FKZ 3512-82-0300). This is FIN Contribution No. 197.
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