The MSC: measuring fisheries sustainability and the implications for ICES

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The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) has pioneered the development of fishery certification and achieved rapid growth in its first 10 years. In North Atlantic (ICES) waters and around the world,more and more industry clients are entering assessment against the MSC programme, with the aim of demonstrating their green credentials and to gain access to the MSC eco-label. This paper emphasizes the need for information to be available for these fisheries, relating to the status of target stocks, and on bycatch species, habitats, and the wider ecosystem. The paper describes how the MSC has evolved since it was established 10 years ago, and outlines the MSC fisheries and supply chain standards and methodologies. The scope of the programme now includes ”enhanced fisheries” usually involving some combination of wild harvest and culture. MSC’s new risk-based framework has also improved accessibility of the programme to small-scale and data-limited fisheries in the developing world and elsewhere. The experiences of scientists working as assessment team members and peer reviewers within the assessment process are described, as is the way in which scientific data are used in MSC assessments. Against this background information, the paper confirms the consistency of the MSC scheme with international guidelines, including the FAO 2005 Guidelines on eco-labelling and the ISEAL Code of Good Practice on Standard Setting. MSC’s work on monitoring and evaluating the impacts of the programme is covered in a companion paper.