TalentView: Chris Ninnes, Aquaculture Stewardship Council

2025 is shaping up to be a milestone year for the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, poised to release its new Farm Standard during the second quarter, which unifies all of ASC’s species-specific standards into a single global, robust standard. It's the latest of a series of ambitious initiatives aiming to support responsible aquaculture and drive transformative change within the sector, including the updated Feed Standard and key projects such as the Improver Programme by ASC.  

But while the organization has made remarkable progress since it was founded in 2010, there’s still plenty of work to do, ASC CEO Chris Ninnes tells WeAreAquaculture.

“When I joined, there were only three of us. Now, the ASC has grown to a team of 135, covering over 2,500 farms in 52 countries and certifying more than 50 species. The growth is a positive sign, but when you look at the overall industry, we’re still only engaging with a single-digit percentage of global aquaculture,” he explains. 

For Ninnes, his work at the ASC is part of a lifelong drive to make a positive impact – and seafood has always been a vitally important part of this, he tells us.

Born and raised in the coastal town of St Ives in Cornwall, UK, Chris reflects his early years were “always in and around the sea”. "At the time St Ives had quite a flourishing small-scale fishing harbour, with a long maritime history. Growing up there, we were always within sight and sound of the sea. The harbour was a familiar sort of playground for kids, so you're inducted into that tradition from a very early age,” he recalls.  

"A friend and I had a 16-foot dinghy with an outboard engine that we used to fish for mackerel. And then over the years, the boats got bigger. I was fourteen when we were first out at sea, and I fished all the way through university. We worked hard at it - it wasn’t unusual for us to be at sea for fourteen to sixteen hours, because it was a tidal harbour, so if you missed the tide and the fish were there, then you stayed out and fished." 

“I think that was a sort of work pattern that carried me through into my professional and paying career,” he reflects.

"The approach I've always taken with my work is that at each stage there's always an opportunity. When you go into something new, you may feel a bit apprehensive. But if you just get stuck into it, you learn and you get life lessons and experience that you can carry forward.” 

Ninnes’ first steps into the world of international seafood came in the early 1980s, after studying biology and marine biology at the University of Exeter, firstly taking part in an overseas development project for local fisheries on Lake Victoria in Kenya, followed by a postgraduate fisheries training scheme, organised by Humberside College and the UK’s Department for International Development, covering everything from fishing policy to processing technologies.

“There were people from all around the world - Bangladesh, Namibia, Nigeria, East Africa, the Pacific. It was very hands-on, covering boats, fishing gears, engines and so on, but also the science of stock assessment, and the environmental issues associated with fisheries management.” 

He continued working in overseas development with a posting to St Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, and then seven years in the Caribbean in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British Overseas Territory southeast of the Bahamas. “I was essentially an adviser to the Minister for Natural Resources, covering everything from protected areas and national parks systems to fisheries management for lobster and conch,” Chris explains. The role also saw him interacting with other departments involved in coastal planning and impact assessment for development, including the islands’ nascent tourism sector. 

This international experience laid the groundwork for his next career move – working for specialist fisheries consultancy, the Marine Resources Assessment Group (MRAG). Ninnes' role at MRAG initially saw him based in Europe, and often working on issues related to Europe’s Common Fisheries Policy and international fisheries management.

Fed up with life in London but still with MRAG, he then took up a post running a regional fisheries management programme based in Namibia but also covering Angola, South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Malawi. This was followed working in the USA where, from 2003-2006, he led the organization’s US operations based out of Saint Petersburg, Florida, working with the US National Marine Fisheries Services in addition to regional fisheries management councils up and down both coasts. 

“It was quite an experience, and although I'd had a good track record in winning work when based in Europe, just to up sticks and move to the States - it's a completely different system. So, it was another strong learning curve to get to grips with the job and prosper the company.” 

It was then that Ninnes was approached by the then-fledgling Marine Stewardship Council. "It was unexpected, but they kept sort of knocking on the door,” he recalls. “We'd only just bought a house in the US, and our son had just been born, so we weren't really thinking about moving!” 

But his interest was piqued, and he joined the MSC as its Deputy CEO and Director of Operations.

“I had been involved in some early discussions about the MSC when I was still in Europe. The development aid business is a fascinating world, but in economic terms, a lot of the money that goes in is essentially a subsidy. And I always felt that the lack of involvement of the commercial sector in that work was always a shortcoming. It was almost as if this work could only prosper bypassing market forces, for governments to go off and replicate what should have been a market activity.” 

“Taking this management and conservation ethic into what was a market-led initiative through the Marine Stewardship Council was a fascinating opportunity. While working with MRAG or DFID there was a lot of policy intervention to try and make things better, but it was always so slow and it could take decades to improve regulation or shift a policy within, say, a regional fisheries management organisation.”  

Instead, Ninnes explains, the MSC focused on consumer direction and purchasing. “Engaging with the market and the retail sector was for me a refreshing new direction in terms of how to land the improvements that most people wanted to see. I was involved in a lot of really interesting work, covering both the market development side, and the standards teams.” 

But when the opportunity came to lead the newly-launched ASC in 2011, Ninnes saw the new role as a natural progression in his career, applying his long experience within the seafood industry – and with market-led improvements through the MSC - to support the fast-growing aquaculture sector. 

Ninnes highlights that the ASC, much like the MSC, operates on the belief that certification can help drive environmental and social change. However, aquaculture presents a unique set of challenges compared to wild-capture fisheries.  

“Aquaculture is a huge growth opportunity globally. Around 60% of the seafood eaten around the world is farmed. And with wild fishery stocks under increasing pressure, we need to get aquaculture right if we are to meet future food demands,” he explains. 

“Joining the ASC was for me also an opportunity to be instrumental in developing certification for aquaculture internationally, learning from the lessons of the past with the MSC, applying this to become a market-led organization – and to build an organizational culture that is the bedrock of the organization.” 

“For me, delegation is key,” he says. “If you create a hierarchical system where all decisions come to the top, you never realize the potential of the people in your organization.” He believes in pushing decisions down the organization, allowing people to take ownership of their roles. “People make mistakes. I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my career, but that’s how you learn and grow.” 

He also recognizes the importance of supporting his team in a mission-driven organization like the ASC, where the work can feel all-consuming.

“Our challenge isn’t motivating people to work - it’s motivating them to stop. Everyone here is mission-led, and that can lead to burnout if not managed properly.” 

For Ninnes, the key challenges and opportunities for the ASC lie in scaling up the organization’s influence. “We need to find ways to certify at a much greater geographical scale. Currently, only about 20% of aquaculture production flows to markets that demand sustainability. We’re focusing on how to engage the other 80%.” 

One of the most promising strategies the ASC is working on is its "Improver Programme," designed to help farms that are not yet ready for certification to begin making incremental improvements.

“Our analysis shows that the market-led incentive structure is not present for much of global aquaculture production,” Ninnes says. “The improver programme addresses this by helping farms make the necessary changes, even if they’re not ready for full certification.” 

It’s about driving change at scale, Ninnes explains. “For over 80% of global production then, we recognise that improving current management practices will bring about environmental and social improvements, in addition to improving profits and production. That's a more complex story and involves lots of smaller scale farmers, which itself brings further challenges. But finding ways to apply the knowledge that we have to those production systems at scale is the pathway that we're on.  

“For me, this is this a huge opportunity, and I foresee that the improver programme aspect of the of the ASC will become bigger than the certification side of it.” 

As the ASC continues to grow, much of ASC’s recent work has been focused on two major projects: the Feed Standard, first released in June 2021 and updated in January 2023, and the new Farm Standard, launching in the second quarter of 2025.  

The Feed Standard, already adopted by 22 certified feed mills globally, addresses the environmental impact of the feed used in aquaculture, with ASC-certified farms due to transition to certified feed before 31 October this year. “Feed accounts for most of the environmental impacts in fed aquaculture,” Ninnes says. “The uptake of our Feed Standard is crucial to reducing that footprint.”  

Today, certified feed mills span across Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Norway, Thailand, Vietnam and the UK, displaying the strong global uptake of the ASC feed certification programme, Ninnes says.

The new Farm Standard is another significant milestone for the ASC, he explains, “not only for ASC certification, but also for responsibly produced farmed seafood worldwide.”

“We’ve consolidated our species-specific standards into a single comprehensive Farm Standard,” Ninnes notes, adding that the standard, which has been under development for several years, impacts on a wide range of sustainability issues, with its four "key principles” covering farm management, environmental responsibility, social responsibility and, for the first time, fish health and welfare. 

“The standard draws together years of experience, research and input from a range of ASC stakeholders spanning many backgrounds. A few months ago, we concluded the last main public consultation for the farm standard, which has involved a lot of dedicated outreach to important stakeholders, from producers all the way through to the end buyers,” he explains.

Building on the Feed Standard and Farm Standard, in addition to the Improver Programme by ASC, Ninnes envisions the ASC playing an increasingly central role in shaping the future of sustainable aquaculture – a sector which will only grow in importance over time, he argues. 

"We all know about the demographics of the world, the population growth, increasing affluence and the desire to consume more protein and the challenges that terrestrial protein production has. A lot of that demand is going to be met through seafood. Even though better fisheries management can improve yields, the potential to increase production through wild capture fisheries is limited, so most of that increase in seafood production will come from farming.”  

“We have a real opportunity to meet many of the global Sustainable Development Goals through responsible aquaculture,” Ninnes contends.  

“The demand for seafood is only going to grow, and we need to ensure that growth happens responsibly. I think the ASC plays a critical role in helping transform the sector into something better.”