The Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) released its first report on its contributions to the responsible aquaculture portion of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), on 15 December, 2022.
At the 2023 Seafood Expo Global, which ran from 25 to 27 April, in Barcelona, Spain, ASC Director of Market Research and Insight Bertrand Charron explained how the organization has worked to align itself with the 17 U.N. SDGs and 169 targets.
“Our planet is facing many challenges, and the SDGs are there to address those challenges. That’s become the [public approach] in policy circles and governance - how governments and nations [are] addressing the SDGs,” Charron told SeafoodSource. “For us, it was interesting to see how we, and the ASC-certified operations tackle which SDGs.”
The ASC report found that 49 percent of the 169 SDG targets were specifically applicable to global aquaculture and ASC's work. Of those 82 targets (i.e. 49% of 169 targets), 80 percent were addressed "well" or "very well."
"We drew up a methodology where we tried to be very strict, conservative, and tough on ourselves to quantify what’s in our scope, and how we address these,” Charron said. "Everybody talks about the SDGs. It was important for us to help companies and stakeholders position themselves. When they talk about ASC, if [they are] ASC-certified or an ASC partner, [they now know] these are the areas where we work well, where we have data that backs up our work; these are not unsubstantiated claims."
ASC also sought to evaluate areas it could improve to better meet the SDG targets.
“We have no planet B. How are we going to make our planet sustainable?" Charron said. "That's the ethos and spirit of what we do at the ASC. There is no environmental sustainability without economic sustainability and social responsibility. One shouldn't conceive a production system to be only economically viable, if it destroyed the environment and the workforce and the labor and the communities on which it relies. One needs to adopt a holistic approach, meaning all these SDG targets are interlinked with each other. And that's exactly the spirit of what we do with our standards."
Photo Courtesy of Bertrand Charron/LinkedIn
