2023 Seafood Stewardship

Nevertheless, as revealed by the three iterations of the Seafood Stewardship Index (2019, 2021 and 2023), the most influential companies in the seafood sector must and have a responsibility to ramp up their efforts to address their social and environmental impacts, potentially catalysing greater progress across the seafood sector. [...] Comparing the average scores achieved by the “Best” (Top-3) companies (often around 50%-60%) to the BPS, we see that the BPS outperforms them in all measurement areas, showing that even those at the top of the SSI ranking have significant room for improvement and thus opportunities to learn from other large companies in the seafood industry. [...] • In the Governance and strategy measurement area, the BPS falls short of the maximum possible score due to the overall poor performance on the Accountability for sustainable strategy indicator (A02) and the Lobbying and advocacy indicator (A04). [...] In this section, we analyse the efforts made by the 30 most influential companies in the seafood sector to address and mitigate the impacts of fisheries and aquaculture operations on ocean biodiversity. [...] While there remains challenges in scaling the use of alternative feed ingredients, the aquaculture production is projected to double by 2050 and the only way to sustain this growth is to improve the efficiency of the industry’s use of marine ingredients (i.e., improve the forage fish dependency ratio (FFDR)) and scale the use of alternative feed ingredients such as terrestrial plant- or animal-bas.