Amid a seafood sustainability landscape that features several databases, regulations, and benchmarks to measure progress, it can be difficult for retailers, fishers, and other players up and down the seafood supply chain to find consistent data on sustainability and align their processes accordingly.
Aiming to alleviate that issue, the Certification and Ratings Collaboration – a collaboration between some of the world's most prominent seafood certification programs, including the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), Marine Stewardship Council, Fair Trade USA, and Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch Program – recently released an updated version of its data tool.
"This collaboration really was a mechanism to try and provide clarity that was absent," ASC CEO Chris Ninnes said. "By pulling together, we could then present a much more comprehensive overview for individuals, companies, and policymakers who have an interest in seafood.”
The collaboration first launched the tool in 2020 but released the updated version in 2024 to include more of the world’s seafood production under one database.
Users can toggle filters to look at what species they are interested in procuring, what certification body certified a particular piece of seafood, whether the seafood they want is fished or farmed, and more data.
All members of the collaboration have committed to releasing an updated version of the tool annually, and in addition to working on improving technical aspects of the tool, Ninnes said the ambition is to continually grow the database’s coverage.
"One of the ambitions we had from the beginning was to try and expand the coverage of production and to bring in organizations that are not currently members of a collaboration but also have data sets that can contribute to global understanding," he said.
One unique aspect of the database is that it includes a tool for analyzing human rights risks and abuses, which was also updated in 2024, highlighting which areas of the world particularly struggle with containing the issue.
Users can hover over a map and click on a country to find out if the nation has been featured in reports about forced labor sent out by the U.S. Department of Labor, to see if a country has failed to ratify relevant international agreements, to determine whether there has been documented evidence of human rights abuses in a particular country’s waters, and more.
“I think seafood follows in the path of other commodities where social issues have been exposed in a negative way,” Ninnes said. "This profiling you get from the tool could help businesses make more proactive decisions about whether there is something they could do.”
Ninnes also highlighted that there are areas where data remains unavailable, and he said policymakers on local, national, and international levels should use the tool to see where more investment is needed.
"The purpose is not just to highlight the production performance of the farms and fisheries; it is also to highlight the gaps so that we can direct interest in improving," he said.