Seafood sustainability groups collaborate on unified tuna data platform

Three major international seafood sustainability organisations are joining forces on a new effort addressing long-standing data gaps in tuna fisheries management.

The Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP), the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), and Global Fishing Watch (GFW) are combining existing databases and monitoring tools to help seafood buyers better assess the environmental impact and compliance of their tuna sourcing.

The collaborative project, which is supported by funding from the Walmart Foundation, links together six databases with information on a wide variety of tuna sustainability indicators: SFP’s FishSource and Seafood Metrics platforms, ISSF’s Proactive Vessel Register (PVR) and list of Vessels in Other Sustainability Initiatives (VOSI), plus GFW’s Vessel Viewer, a global map showing fishing vessel activity, and Marine Manager, an ocean monitoring platform combining fishing and environmental data.

“These databases include sustainability indicators beyond the health of fish stocks and management practices, to reflect market needs and ensure responsible tuna sourcing," the organisations said in a joint press release announcing the initiative.

SFP’s Biodiversity and Nature Director, Kathryn Novak, said the partnership was designed to make existing data more useful to seafood buyers.

“We aren’t reinventing the wheel. We’re making it easier for tuna buyers to utilise 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,” she said. “By combining existing resources, we can equip buyers with the information they need to make more informed decisions.”

A key challenge for global tuna fisheries remains the lack of visibility into what happens at sea, the partner organisations point out. Many longline tuna fisheries operate with observer coverage below the recommended 5%, while vessel-level reporting on bycatch mitigation and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing practices is still incomplete. The partners say that improved transparency through open data sharing and vessel-level monitoring is essential to fill these gaps.

“Verified transparency is the cornerstone of credible, science-based sustainability," said Susan Jackson, President of ISSF. “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.”

Charles Kilgour, Director of Program Initiatives at GFW, added that the partnership would help “empower tuna buyers with the information they need to make responsible sourcing decisions”. He said integrating data sources into a familiar industry platform “enables industry to better target risk mitigation efforts and strengthens accountability and cooperation between government and industry”.