We seek out little-known fisheries ‘doing the right thing’. We need a consistent way of scoring them and the fisheries already in restaurants’ fish ‘portfolio’ (which could be from anywhere in the world). Our starting point are the technical guidelines underlying the globally agreed FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries.

Why do we score some fisheries worse than other initiatives?

Our aim is not to rate or label fisheries for consumers – we recommend that restaurants wanting to label fish on their menus use MSC and MCS’s FishOnline ratings.

However, we do provide information on our internal assessments on this website. Our founding on FAO Code of Conduct Technical Guidelines may result differences with the scores of MSC and FishOnline. Moreover, the MSC label is given for fisheries exceeding a scoring threshold, while we retain the distinctions ‘up the scale’. One example is our scoring of ‘stock status’ because few management bodies around the world (upon whose data MSC also draw) have set positive ‘target reference points’ for stocks consistent with FAO Technical Guidelines. Quantifiable assessment of the knock-on effects of a fishery on other stocks and other wildlife also lags well behind the usual ‘single-stock assessments’ of the targeted fish. For this reason it is currently very difficult for a fishery, anywhere in the world, to get higher than 2/5 for stock status.

This is both why MSC may have certified, and we may source from – in our terms – a low scoring fishery. High scores are challenging, long term, goals. Our principle aim is to displace lower scoring with higher scoring fisheries, so it is the relative differences that are important to us.

There are similar distinctions between FishOnline and our scores, where we go down to local and even boat-based differences, for example on selectivity. For an example see the differences between two North Sea long-line fisheries here and here.

Why do you support fisheries that get bad scores?

We may also support fisheries that get a low score where we are convinced this is the result of the actions or inactions of others, and we believe ‘our’ fishery is a major part of the solution. An example is the the Suffolk long line fishery from a specific boat, the Jolene, which catches North Sea cod and thornback rays, resulting in a ‘1-worst case’ score for stock status. However we believe that the method - as practised by the Jolene - would play a major part in restoring stocks if widely practised.