The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) has established a program whereby a fishery may be certified as being sustainable. The sustainability of a fishery is defined by MSC criteria embodied in three Principles: relating to the status of the stock (Principle 1), the ecosystem of which the stock is a member (Principle 2), and the fishery management system (Principle 3).
Since many of these MSC criteria are comparable for global tuna stocks, the MSC scoring system was used to evaluate 23 stocks of tropical and temperate tunas throughout the world (based on Principle 1) and also to evaluate the management systems of the Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) associated with these stocks (based on Principle 3).
The 2023 ISSF report with P1 and P3 scores, ISSF 2023-02: An Evaluation of the Sustainability of Global Tuna Stocks Relative to Marine Stewardship Council Criteria, is authored by P. A. H. Medley and J. Gascoigne.
This graphic, based on data from the 2023 report, shows what the average scores based on Principle 1 have been since 2013, and how they have changed over time.
The MSC’s Principle 1 states: “A fishery must be conducted in a manner that does not lead to overfishing or depletion of the exploited populations and, for those populations that are depleted, the fishery must be conducted in a manner that demonstrably leads to their recovery.”
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