Pre-assessments
Medfish Project’s pre-assessments have been undertaken by independent Conformity Assessment Bodies, accredited to assess the performance of a fishery against the MSC Fisheries Standard.
For each Performance Indicator within the pre-assessment reports, MSC’s scoring levels should be understood as below:
- Pass: Information suggests the fishery is likely to meets the MSC’s level of best practices for a given Performance Indicator.
- Conditional pass: Information suggests that for a given Performance Indicator the fishery reaches the MSC’s minimum acceptable level but may not meet the level of best practices. A condition may therefore be needed.
- Fail: Information suggests the fishery is not likely to meet the MSC’s minimum acceptable level for a given Performance Indicator.
When fisheries do not meet the requirements for achieving the MSC pass level, this does not necessarily mean that practices within the fishery are unsustainable or that the target species is overexploited. Often there is simply insufficient information to allow a reliable assessment of the fishery against an MSC’s Performance Indicator.
Additionally, it should be noted that a pre-assessment does not go into the level of detail and scrutiny undertaken in an MSC’s full assessment which implies more time, broader stakeholder consultations and data collection. For this reason, it cannot be guaranteed that every last issue in relation to all fisheries have been identified, or that the outcome of a full assessment process can be predicted with absolute accuracy. Therefore, when a fishery is shown to meet the MSC requirements, this is merely an indication of its likely outcome within a full assessment process - it does not mean that the fishery is certified.
Actions and action plans
Actions for improvement were defined through participatory processes – engaging with relevant fishery’s representatives and stakeholders and with the support of consultants and WWF where needed – for any MSC Performance Indicators labelled as ‘fail’ or ‘conditional pass’ in the pre-assessment reports. All actions defined for a given fishery were later compiled in a single action plan.
When a search is performed in the database, the table called ‘Related actions’ displays improvement actions related to those MSC Performance Indicators that were initially included in the specific search.
Action plans and their specific actions represent voluntary roadmaps for improvement, which rely on agreements between fishery’s stakeholders for their implementation.
Additional information
The database’s search results provide a summary of the information included in the pre-assessment reports and action plans documents. Please refer to the project's webpage or the links available in the database result’s tables for a full access to the information present in the reports.
Further information on the MSC Fisheries Standard can be found here
Please share any question, request or suggestion you may have regarding this database or the Medfish Project by sending an email to medfish@msc.org