Summary

The seafood sector has been working to address issues of sustainability for decades, but much progress is still required. Recent media revelations around human rights abuses in fisheries provide new impetus for improving social responsibility and eradicating human rights abuses in fisheries worldwide.

This project seeks to organize a community of practice, comprised of human rights and fisheries experts and practitioners, to catalyze the systematic integration of social responsibility into seafood supply chains.

Specifically, we have co-developed a social responsibility assessment methodology for seafood supply chains, intended for use in fishery improvement projects and aquaculture improvement projects, to identify areas of high social risk and to guide the improvement of these high-risk areas. This highly collaborative process involved expert workshops, public comment periods and continual communication, socialization and dissemination of our co-created methodology.

We have now reached the piloting phase of this initiative and are in the field in various fisheries around the world testing assessment methodology and training material, and are beginning to collect data on social responsibility performance to foster improvements.