Marine Stewardship Council Aker Biomarine Krill Fishery Certification

ASOC and other stakeholders recently submitted comments to Moody Marine on its public draft report.  Click below to read them. ASOC Comments on Moody Marine Public Draft Report WWF Comments on Moody Marine Public Draft Report Antarctic Krill Conservation Project Comments on Moody Marine Public Draft Report

Introduction:
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is currently evaluating the Aker Biomarine Krill Fishery in the Southern Ocean to determine if the fishery meets its standards for sustainable fishing.

Aker Biomarine already harvests krill from the area under study, which is in the Southern Ocean under the jurisdiction of the Commission on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).  CCAMLR has embraced a precautionary approach to fisheries management, which means that any expansion in fishing must be supported by data that clearly indicates that the target species and the rest of the ecosystem will not be negatively affected. The MSC is the most widely known organization providing sustainability certifications to fisheries.  Fisheries seeking the MSC seal of approval must undergo an extensive assessment process by a third-party certifier.  In theory, a fishery supervised by CCAMLR and approved by MSC should be sustainable and well-managed.  However, stakeholders such as ASOC and other NGOs are allowed to have input into the process and raise objections if they do not believe that  a fishery meets these standards.

At a stakeholder meeting on February 12th, ASOC members Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) presented their concerns about the certification of the fishery to the MSC.  Their opinions can be read in their papers here and here.  The Antarctic Krill Conservation Project (AKCP) has also submitted comments to the MSC, which can be read here.  If you wish to provide feedback to the MSC, please contact Seran Davies or Andrew Hough, the lead certifiers for Moody Marine, the company that conducts the certification process.  You can track the fishery's certification status at the MSC site here.  Moody Marine has released a draft report on their assessment of the fishery, and ASOC will provide official comments on the report soon.

ASOC and its member groups are concerned not only that the MSC methodology has notable gaps, such as its omission of the impact climate change can have on a fishery (read more about ASOC's position on climate change and MSC metholodology here), but also that the fishery has been given unjustifiably high scores by Moody Marine.  First, there are still many uncertainties about krill biology and reproduction that make effective management of the stock very difficult.  Current krill catch levels are still below established catch limits, these limits are set for large areas of the ocean and do not take into account the ecological relationships between krill, dependent species, and fishing operations, which occur at much smaller scales. The current fishery for krill coincides almost entirely within foraging ranges of several species of krill-dependent predators, causing competition for krill between fishing vessels and these predators.

ASOC Objections
Some of ASOC's main objections to the certification of the Aker Biomarine Krill Fishery by MSC are:

• MSC's standards allow for the certification of a single operator in a fishery. In general, this seems to run contrary to their mission of ocean protection - if a few ships are acting responsibly but the vast majority are not, the target population could still be at risk of being overfished. For the krill fishery it is particularly dangerous, because other operators are not consistently providing the information that CCAMLR needs to make management decisions. In this instance, Aker Biomarine may be fulfilling MSC guidelines, but it may be the only one in the fishery that is doing so. It is impossible to determine if their fishing is sustainable if it cannot be analyzed in the larger context of the whole fishery.
• In cases where Moody Marine does rely on fishery-wide data, they ignore problematic data. The ecosystem monitoring program of CCAMLR, the CEMP, is supposed to collect data to make sure that penguins, seals, and other krill predators are not affected by krill fishing. The CEMP is currently inadequate, however, with few of the sites currently being monitored located near where fishing is taking place. Since predators are often affected by local declines, this is a significant problem. One of the scientists who peer reviewed the report voiced similar concerns about the adequacy of CEMP, but was dismissed by the Moody Marine team.
• Climate change impacts to species are not considered by MSC methodology. As krill have been proven to be susceptible to climate change, the impact of warming temperatures on the population must be considered if fishing is to be sustainable.
• Numerous uncertainties are associated with the determinants and drivers of krill population size. Though extensively studied, scientists are still learning what determines krill population size. Without this knowledge, it is difficult to set appropriate catch limits. Though many consider the harvest of krill to be "low" because it is a small portion of the estimated total population, krill populations appear to be in long-term decline and as mentioned above, local depletions can harm predator species.