The Alliance has a goal that by 2030, 75% of global seafood production will be environmentally responsible with safeguards in place to ensure social responsibility. At last year’s Alliance Strategy Meeting, we committed to taking on three focused projects each year that will help to get us closer to achieving our ambitious goals.
For each project, we will create:
- An action plan identifying how the priority will make progress toward the 2030 goals, including a work plan to meet those goals;
- A Call to Action that will point NGOs, industry, and others to topics they can make progress on, and what work is expected of them; and
- Public progress reports twice a year against the action plan through 2023.
Today, the Alliance announces the first of these projects: a collaboration with our colleagues at the NGO Tuna Forum on market advocacy in support of responsible tuna production!
The Global Hub identified tuna as a high-volume species group and a strong candidate for a focused project as 52.8% of production does not meet the Alliance’s goal. This topic was confirmed following discussions with the Certification and Ratings Collaboration and other groups.
Tuna represents 3.12% of global seafood production (per the CRC Data Tool). Two major factors drive sustainability issues in tuna: management and bycatch. For highly migratory species like tuna, improvements in these areas require advocacy and reform at Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs). Several tuna collaborations are well aligned in their advocacy and improvement work, including groups like the NGO Tuna Forum, International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF; which represents tuna processors, traders, and marketers), and Global Tuna Alliance (representing retailers and tuna supply chain companies). One component of these organizations’ work is market advocacy in which companies show support for tuna conservation measures to RFMO delegations and/or make requests of their supply chains.
For the rest of 2022, the Alliance is leveraging the networks and collective influence of the Global Hub to help the NGO Tuna Forum reach RFMOs with priority asks that focus on the most important and urgent management and bycatch reforms needed to improve the sustainability of tuna. With the Global Hub’s help, we will encourage NGOs and companies to sign letters of support for these essential reforms and then carry out actions in their supply chains to implement the necessary changes.
We are proud to be partnering with the NGO Tuna Forum on this important initiative!
