MONTREAL – Thursday, April 25, 2019 - Today, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is pleased to announce it has become an official indicator for a second Aichi Target as part of the global Biodiversity Indicators Partnership, once again confirming the MSC’s role in global monitoring of biodiversity conservation. Aichi Target 4 states: “By 2020, at the latest, Governments, businesses and stakeholders at all levels have taken steps to achieve or have implemented plans for sustainable consumption and production and have kept the impacts of use of natural resources well within safe ecological limits.”
The MSC will provide two indicators to track progress towards Aichi Target 4: ‘Number of MSC Chain of Custody (CoC) Certification holders by distribution country’ and ‘Number of MSC certified, consumer-facing products by distribution country’. The more MSC CoC certificates and products there are, the more the international community will know it is on track to achieving this target.
“The MSC program is designed to provide incentive and recognition for responsible ocean stewardship both on the water and throughout the supply chain,” said Dr. Francis Neat, Head of Strategic Research for the MSC. “Over the past 20 years investing in science and research has been a central part of our journey. It not only provides the data necessary to contribute to monitoring global progress toward the conservation of biodiversity but also to tell powerful stories of positive impact and change.”
In 2010, the international community set 20 targets under the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity. These ‘Aichi Targets’ map global progress towards the Convention’s 2020 goals to conserve biodiversity around the world. Since 2013 the MSC has supplied data to help assess progress towards Aichi Target six: by 2020, all fish and invertebrate stocks and aquatic plants will be managed and harvested sustainably, legally and applying eco-system based approaches. MSC data also contributes to the Convention on Biological Diversity’s flagship publication, The Global Biodiversity Outlook.
Only a small group of international NGOs are key partners in the Biodiversity Indicator Partnership. These include the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, the Sea Around Us Project, the FSC, the MSC and WWF.
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For more information:
Céline Rouzaud
Senior Marketing and Communications Manager, MSC Canada
[email protected]
416-779-7014
About the MSC
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is an international non-profit organization. Its vision is for the world’s oceans to be teeming with life, and seafood supplies safeguarded for this and future generations. The MSC certification program recognises and rewards sustainable fishing practices and is helping create a more sustainable seafood market.
The MSC blue label on a seafood product means that:
- It comes from a wild-catch fishery which has been independently certified to the MSC’s science-based standard for environmentally sustainable fishing.
- It’s fully traceable to a sustainable source.
More than 350 fisheries in over 35 countries are certified to the MSC’s Standard. These fisheries have a combined annual seafood production of almost 10 million metric tonnes, representing close to 12% of annual global marine harvest. More than 28,000 seafood products worldwide carry the MSC blue label. msc.org