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Concerns over fishing impacts on marine populations and ecosystems have intensified the need to improve ocean management. One increasingly popular market-based instrument for ecological stewardship is the use of certification and eco-labeling programs to highlight sustainable fisheries with low environmental impacts. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is the most prominent of these programs. Despite widespread discussions about the rigor of the MSC standards, no comprehensive analysis of the performance of MSC-certified fish stocks has yet been conducted. We compared status and abundance trends of 45 certified stocks with those of 179 uncertified stocks, finding that 74% of certified fisheries were above biomass levels that would produce maximum sustainable yield, compared with only 44% of uncertified fisheries. On average, the biomass of certified stocks increased by 46% over the past 10 years, whereas uncertified fisheries increased by just 9%. As part of the MSC process, fisheries initially go through a confidential pre-assessment process. When certified fisheries are compared with those that decline to pursue full certification after pre-assessment, certified stocks had much lower mean exploitation rates (67% of the rate producing maximum sustainable yield vs. 92% for those declining to pursue certification), allowing for more sustainable harvesting and in many cases biomass rebuilding. From a consumer’s point of view this means that MSC-certified seafood is 3–5 times less likely to be subject to harmful fishing than uncertified seafood. Thus, MSC-certification accurately identifies healthy fish stocks and conveys reliable information on stock status to seafood consumers.

Agnew, D. J., Gutiérrez, N. L., Stern-Pirlot, A., and Hoggarth, D. D. 2014. The MSC experience: developing an operational certification standard and a market incentive to improve fishery sustainability. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 71: 216–225. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) standard for sustainable fisheries is represented by three high-level principles and a set of 31 indicators and scoring guidelines, known as the “default assessment tree”. Over the 14 years, since it was developed in 1999, the MSC has faced the challenge of maintaining its standard at the level of global best practice, keeping up with developments in the science and management of fisheries, and making sure that certified fisheries maintain their performance at that standard, or raise it where they fall below it. The MSC has had to regularly and widely engage with multiple stakeholders to ensure that its policy development is consistent with stakeholder expectations. Although many fisheries have made significant improvements to their performance, sometimes performance has declined, leading to further requirements for improvement. The MSC needed to design a program that balances credibility, accessibility, and improvement to move the world's fisheries towards sustainability.

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