Credit: Monterey Bay Aquarium

The Certification and Ratings Collaboration members developed three detailed performance frameworks to help us understand the differences and similarities between our standards

Performance Frameworks (2016-2020)

When we began working together, we identified two challenges:

  •  Internally, we didn’t understand each other’s standards and methodologies, making it hard to trust each other and collaborate.
  •  Externally, there was confusion in the seafood industry about how our standards differed and why our processes sometimes resulted in different outcomes for the same fishery or aquaculture operation.

To address these challenges, we launched a multi-year project to compare our standards so that we better understood how each other measured environmental and social performance.

We built three frameworks; an environmental performance framework for wild capture and one for aquaculture, and a framework for social issues that covers both fisheries and farms.

The Framework for Social Performance in the Seafood Sector is available on our website.

A paper on what we learned from developing the Aquaculture Performance Framework entitled The aquaculture sustainability continuum – Defining an environmental performance framework, is published by Environmental and Sustainability Indicators.

The Wild Capture Performance Framework was used to create a tool to help fishery improvement projects better understand and communicate their performance in the scoring range from 0-60. The full tool is available here, and has also been integrated into the Environmental Rapid Assessment Tool for basic FIPs. FIPs reporting on FisheryProgress.org now have the option to publish scores in the 0-60 range.

For more information, check out our performance frameworks video.