Guides to explain sustainability and related issues

A few years ago, in our Responsible Sourcing team, we discussed the idea of creating a textbook to provide information on sustainability, responsible sourcing and related issues. We wanted to share information on these topics to improve understanding across the seafood industry. However, these issues can develop and change quickly, so we ultimately decided to take a different approach, creating a series of guides and overviews on individual topics instead. 

We have now released our latest ‘Guides to…’ and ‘Overview’ documents. These documents cover various important sustainability topics for seafood businesses. The latest versions replace the content we developed years ago with up to date information. 

The guides have been developed to help make technical content accessible to a wider audience. Steven Hawking said: ‘Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve its sales’. We’re not concerned about sales, but we have kept this point in mind, aiming to create ‘Overviews’, which provide a short introduction to the topics of stock assessment and fisheries management and the more in depth ‘Guides’.  

These documents are designed to be useful to people without scientific knowledge on sustainability. We hope they will help those working across the seafood supply chain who are responsible for understanding sustainability issues within their business, as well as others with an interest in the topic. 

Our Guide to Sustainable and Responsible Seafood Sourcing gives a broad brush overview of the bigger picture on sustainability. One of the more significant updates from previous guidance on this is the growing importance of ethics as part of sustainability. There are also four overviews and four guides to fisheries management and stock assessment. These include data-limited stock assessment, which have been significantly revised in recent years, due to advances in this subject. 

Our Guide to Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing includes information on how and why this can occur. It also includes information on the fight against this global threat to the sustainable management of fish stocks. 

Our Guide to Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) covers assessment and management of UK MPAs and also takes a worldwide view, looking at legislative and policy drivers behind them. 

Our Guide to Protected species has more of a UK perspective, looking at protected species of key concern in UK fisheries as well as measures to support assessment, management and mitigation of protected species bycatch.  

You can download all of our guides by following the links below:

You can also find out more information about all of these topics from our webpages linked below: