Project:Inshore is a collaboration of the Marine Stewardship Council and Seafish. Small, coastal fishing boats, or the “Inshore Fleet,” make up nearly three quarters of England’s fishing fleet. The rich array of seafood they serve up also presents unique scientific challenges for fishery managers. Relatively small landings per vessel, with varying market demand from one day to the next, make it hard to attract investment for scientific research. Accordingly, these data-limited fisheries are trapped in a vicious cycle whereby their performance remains unclear, leading to poor NGO/sustainability ratings, leading to poor commercial uptake, leading to poor research investment. Project:Inshore has utilized the Marine Stewardship Council Standard for sustainable fishing to produce tailored sustainability reports for every inshore fishery around the English coast. This was the first time a third-party standard for sustainable fisheries had been used as a measure of performance and strategy for improvement of national fisheries. The Project:Inshore model has — for the first time — mapped all of these fisheries together and provided sustainability reports for each of them, helping to secure seafood supplies from these fisheries for this and future generations.
