Marine Stewardship Council Southern Ocean Fisheries Certifications
In late 2008, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) announced that two fisheries in the Southern Ocean, Aker Biomarine Antarctic Krill Fishery and the Ross Sea Toothfish Fishery had entered the full assessment phase of MSC's sustainability program. ASOC is concerned that there is not enough scientific information available to manage these fisheries. Krill are the base of the Antarctic foodweb, and unsustainable harvesting will therefore threaten the entire ecosystem. The amount of krill required by predators has not been adequately quantified, and fishing may harm local groups of predators, if not the overall krill population. Furthermore, Antarctic toothfish are a long-lived, slow-maturing species that have proved extremely vulnerable to overfishing. ASOC urges MSC and Moody Marine, the independent entitity that evaluates the fisheries, to reconsider awarding certification to these fisheries.
A krill trawler in the Southern Ocean.
In the public draft reports issued on the toothfish and krill fisheries by Moody Marine, ASOC found a number of problems. Perhaps most troubling, Moody Marine is very dismissive towards the experienced peer reviewers who analyzed their reports and often disagreed with Moody Marine's conclusions. Moody Marine's scoring process on the various performance indicators that determine whether a fishery qualifies for certification is also difficult to follow because the discussion of the rationale for the scores and the references are presented separately. Anyone wishing to verify the assertions for the indicators would have to either already be familar with all the sources listed or review them all. This method of presentation of performance indicators and scores makes it extremely difficult to follow Moody's reasoning.
For both the toothfish and the krill fisheries reports, ASOC has identified a number of problems with Moody Marine's assessments of the fisheries and the resulting passing scores they received. Read more about our criticisms of the toothfish certification here, and the krill certification here. Read our concerns about the lack of inclusion of climate change data in the MSC methodology here.
Additional information:
ASOC Member Greenpeace-New Zealand has also expressed concerns about the MSC's overall methodology and its effectiveness in ensuring that all certified fisheries are truly sustainable. Read their letter to MSC here.
Some highlights from the Greenpeace-NZ letter:
Undermining marine protection
There is currently no initial step in the MSC assessment and certification process in which consideration is given to whether there should be fishing of the species being assessed in the given area, or indeed whether there should be fishing for any species in the given area. Certification should not be considered for fisheries operating in areas that are under application or warrant marine protection such as marine reserve designation, or else the certification will have negative consequences for achieving that protection.
Destructive fishing inadequately defined
The MSC definition of a destructive fishery is woefully inadequate. Only fishing with poisons or explosives is currently included in this definition. This should be extended to include driftnet fishing (which has an extremely high rate of bycatch of marine life including whales, dolphins, turtles and non-target fish species) and bottom trawling and dredging (which lay waste to seabed communities, including vulnerable and long-lived seamount ecosystems in the case of bottom trawling). Bottom trawling in particular has been widely condemned by scientists. Further, the UN General Assembly urged member states to regulate bottom trawling in a highly precautionary way, and to close to fishing entirely certain areas known to be highly vulnerable, such as seamounts and cold water corals.
Ocean acidification and climate change not adequately considered
There is no recognition given in the MSC Fisheries Assessment Methodology to the increasing environmental variability caused by CO2 emissions; ocean acidification and climate change. This should be included as an over-arching element of the certification requiring that management plans for the target species, retained and bycatch species and endangered, threatened and protected (ETP) species account for potential additional variability in populations due to acidification and climate change-related impacts.
Greater resilience needs to be built into fisheries management to account for these impacts, including the designation of no-take marine reserve areas that will act as both refuges and insurance areas, and as control sites to assess the impacts of these environmental changes with and without fishing.
Low performance indicators
MSC's standards for scoring fisheries allow fisheries to receive passing scores on some indicators even though they are engaging in unsustainable or questionable practices.
For example: Fisheries should not be certified unless or until they have rebounded from any previous overfishing – not while they remain below the target biomass. Currently fisheries can be conditionally certified while the stock is still rebuilding. This sends the wrong message to consumers. Fisheries can also receive the maximum score (100) for habitat protection performance even if there is to a 20% likelihood of serious or irreversible harm. This is far too great a risk for a supposedly sustainable fishery to be placing on the habitat. Scores for compliance and enforcement have similarly low criteria. Currently, this indicator is scored so low that a fishery for which there is evidence of
systematic non-compliance could nevertheless be certified by the MSC.
Alarmingly, under MSC's standards a partially collapsed fishery can pass pre-assessment, a precursor to full certification. The NZ scallop fishery is partially collapsed and currently yields only around 20 per cent of the Total
Allowable Commercial Catch. The causes of the collapse in the Tasman Bay part of the scallop fishery are not fully understood, but are thought to be associated with the impacts of repeated dredging as well as land use impacts, both of which factors are present in the other parts of the challenger scallop area. A fishery that has recently been dredged to collapse and after five years is still showing no sign of recovery is patently not a sustainable fishery and is therefore not a suitable candidate for MSC certification.