Three fishery monitoring organizations – the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP), Global Fishing Watch (GFW), and the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) – are collaborating to combine their databases to improve transparency in the tuna supply chain. The goal, the organizations said, is to give tuna buyers access to information, including vessel by vessel bycatch data and observer reports, in one place.
The project, which will draw on SFP’s buyer transparency databases, FishSource and Seafood Metrics, ISSF’s Proactive Vessel Register (PVR) and Vessels in Other Sustainability Initiatives (VOSI), and GFW’s Vessel Viewer and Marine Manager, is funded by grants from the Walmart Foundation.
SFP Biodiversity and Nature Director Kathryn Novak said that the project will simply “make it easier for tuna buyers to utilize all of the valuable, existing data and resources by putting them together on a platform they’re already familiar with and connecting it with their sourcing.”
“By combining existing resources, we can equip buyers with the information they need to make more informed decisions,” said Novak.
In a release about the news, the organizations said that currently, available transparency data is fragmented and disorganized, requiring buyers to aggregate information from numerous sources.
“By integrating key data sources into a platform already familiar with industry, we’re helping build a broader and more inclusive understanding of vessel-level activity – including data gaps and key risk indicators,” Global Fishing Watch Director of Program Initiatives Charles Kilgour said. “This enables industry to better target risk mitigation efforts and strengthens accountability and cooperation between government and industry, in a way that is driving a shift to more sustainable and transparent policies."
ISSF President Susan Jackson called transparency "the cornerstone of credible, science-based sustainability.”
“By contributing vessel-level insights to this collaboration, we’re helping to close information gaps that have long challenged stakeholders seeking to evaluate seafood sustainability,” said Jackson.
