The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is an international voluntary sustainability standard-setter and seafood ecolabelling program. Established in 1997, the MSC’s mission is to contribute to the health of the world’s oceans by promoting sustainable fisheries and effective management through its third-party certification scheme [1]. By utilizing its ecolabel as a market-based incentive and rewarding sustainability, the MSC encourages improvements ‘on the water’, by certifying fisheries that have demonstrated good environmental practices as articulated in the MSC’s Fishery Sustainability Standard [2]. For a product to exhibit the MSC ecolabel, all companies in the supply chain that handled that product must be certified under the MSC Chain of Custody (CoC) Standard [2] which guarantees full traceability of the product from a certified sustainable source.
The MSC Fisheries Standard defines fishery sustainability on the basis of the guidelines of Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) code of conduct for responsible fisheries [3], and strives to incorporate internationally-established best practice and best available science. The Fishery Standard requirements focus on three principles: healthy target stock status; mitigation of environmental impacts; and effective management [4]. In order to achieve and/or maintain certification, fisheries might need to, among other things, reduce fishing effort, establish new harvest strategies, mitigate fishing impacts on vulnerable species, habitats and ecosystems, change governance or policy practices, or define fishery-specific management.
MSC’s mission as an organisation is underpinned by its theory of change (ToC), see Fig. 1. A ToC describes how or why a change or desired outcome is hypothesised to occur within a given context. The MSC’s ToC suggests that recognising sustainable fishing practices with certificates and eco-labels creates market incentives to improve fishing practices. When a consumer chooses to purchase MSC certified seafood over another seafood product, certified fisheries are rewarded for their sustainable practice through that market preference. Furthermore, purchasing preferences may go beyond individual consumers to include processors, suppliers and retailers who can make commitments to sourcing MSC certified products. Such preferences may increase the global demand and market access for certified fisheries and provide the incentives needed for fisheries to undergo the rigorous assessments to potentially become MSC certified. Increasing numbers of certified fisheries, coupled with greater consumer awareness may incentivise further fisheries that are operating below the MSC standard to make sustainable changes ‘on the water’ in line with the organisation’s principles. For example, to align with principle 2 of the Fishery Standard (minimising environmental impact) a fishery may adjust its practices to ensure that other species and habitats in the ecosystem remain healthy. This could mean fishing at night to avoid accidental bird entanglements or collecting information on seabed impacts so as to better manage the potential effects of fishing activities.
In order to qualify for MSC certification a minimum score of 60 must be achieved for each of the 31 principle issues in the Standard and fisheries must achieve an average score of 80 overall for each of the three Principles (determined by the average of the principle issue scores under that Principle) [5]. Where a fishery scores above 60 but below 80, a fishery is given a ‘condition’ where that score must be improved to the 80 level over the certification period (usually 5 years) [5]. The MSC allows fisheries to qualify for MSC certification without meeting the 80 level on all indicators because the movement of fisheries from the 60 to 80 levels is where fisheries are able to transparently improve their practice and undergo surveillance in this period. If a fishery fails to a ‘close’ a ‘condition’ within a set time period, their certification will be taken away. This is one of the tenets of MSC’s theory of change as it contributes to improved fisheries practice. This process is broadly outlined in Fig. 1.
This process can result in environmental impacts (changes in the health of target fish stocks or more effectives fisheries management) as well as impacts on the market (greater demand and/or supply of sustainable seafood or consumers willing to pay price premiums for eco-labelled products). Importantly the changes that occur due to fisheries voluntarily complying with the MSC’s standards or through the ‘closing’ of ‘conditions’ directly align with the principles and criteria in the standards themselves. For example, Principle 1 states that: “The fishing activity must be at a level which is sustainable for the fish population. Any certified fishery must operate so that fishing can continue indefinitely and is not overexploiting the resources” [4]. Here, to attain a score of 80 (for one of the principle issues within Principle 1) there “shall be evidence that the stock is at the target reference point now or has fluctuated around the target reference point for the past few years” [4]. As such the term ‘sustainable’ is linked to the target reference point of a stock (i.e. the amount of biomass of a particular stock believed to allow the population to maintain a sustainable yield). Thus, the MSC can only claim to create changes in line with this definition of ‘sustainable’. In other words, the ToC does not just outline potential sustainable changes on the water but specific changes that directly align with the principles and criteria in the MSC’s Standards.
The potential changes described in the ToC and their outcomes have been described in published literature. These include effects of MSC certification on fisheries management [6, 7], supply chains [7, 8] and the eco-labels impact on consumer awareness [9, 10]. There are further published reported impacts that are not described in Fig. 1. These include effects on local economies [11], coastal communities [8], and international law [12]. It is this diverse range of impacts that this systematic map aims to capture. To this end, a comprehensive catalogue of relevant studies across disciplines, methods and geographic regions will provide an overview of knowledge clusters and knowledge gaps. Such an overview will contribute to elucidate the state of knowledge on how fisheries sustainability standards perform and operate, and answer Cooke et al. “Call for evidence-based conservation and management of fisheries and aquatic resources” [13]. This is important given that a search of articles published by Environmental Evidence, the official journal of the Collaboration of Environmental Evidence, finds few systematic maps and reviews that deal explicitly with marine fisheries except Araujo et al. [14], Hughes et al. [15] and Leisher et al. [16] and none that focus on certification and/or eco-labels.
While literature regarding the MSC has been included in previous systematic mapping and review exercises [17,18,19], these studies have focused exclusively on final outcomes of certification and sustainability standards (e.g. practice adoption or environmental impacts). Here, we seek a comprehensive overview of all the aspects of the MSC program that researchers have focused on, including management and policy processes, consumer awareness and willingness to pay, to name a few.
Systematic reviews of different sustainability standards rely on evidence typology and inclusion criteria [e.g., PICO (population, intervention, comparator, outcomes) or study design such as BACI (Before, after, control, intervention)] that may be difficult to apply to studies of changes in fisheries management [20]. For example, wild capture fisheries occur in highly dynamic environments, with harvesters and marine populations shifting spatially and temporally. These are harder to monitor than crops or forests that are spatially fixed and clearly delimited entities. In addition, potentially broad spatial scales over which some species are distributed, (such as the wide migratory range of tuna populations), or the vertical distribution of vulnerable ecosystems in the water column, make it costly and difficult to conduct randomised control trials or collecting information on covariates that control for such effects. This means that very strict selection filters risk excluding a large proportion of studies and, with them, potentially valuable insights. To avoid this, the PICO framework will be applied. Studies that lack comparators will still be included but will be noted separately. Also, any study design will be included.
Herein summary, we propose to map all the literature on the MSC without narrowing the scope based on study design. To our knowledge such a broad yet systematic review exercise has not been undertaken before. This document has been developed following the RepOrting standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses (ROSES) for systematic map protocols [21] and the CEE Guidelines and Standards for Evidence Synthesis [22].
Stakeholder engagement
There are various definitions of stakeholder in the literature. According to the ‘ROSES for systematic map protocols’ a definition of stakeholder should be used to include researchers and decision-makers with a stake in the systematic map being created. As seen in Table 1 of Haddaway et al. [23] the term can refer to “People that have an interest in the subject matter: includes researchers and experts”, “someone who has a stake in the findings” or “those …that use the information from a systematic review”. Haddaway et al. [23] also encourages a broader inclusion of stakeholders potentially affected by the results of the map. As such, the following methods and questions have been formulated and developed with input from MSC staff and external researchers who have expertise in fisheries biological sciences, marine ecology, the development and application of the MSC’s standards, social science, and economics. The stakeholders were chosen for their expertise, covering the array of disciplines that tend to focus on the MSC, thus ensuring that all aspects and perspectives of the programme will be captured in the mapping process, as well as taking diverse perspectives into account. The MSC staff have a stake in the findings, are most likely to be affected by the review and have decision-making capabilities. The external researchers are interested in the subject matter and may use the information from the review. While this is not an exhaustive representation of all stakeholders potentially affected by the results of the review, these stakeholders will nevertheless “ensure that inputs and outputs are of the greatest relevance and reliability to all interested parties” [23]. The stakeholder described will provide input throughout the review process including the coding, analysis and write-up stages. Meetings with stakeholders were held at the MSC headquarters office in London on 25 April 2018 and remotely on 30 April 2018 to formulate the research questions, search techniques, inclusion and exclusion criteria and discuss the available evidence in general.
Objective of the review
This proposed systematic map aims to identify evidence of the impacts of MSC and to collate and describe the topic areas of research undertaken to date on the environmental, social and economic effects of the MSC program. It will also collect and describe the type of evidence thee articles draw on. This will help identify areas most commonly researched, trends in the research over time, and knowledge and data gaps, and will help identify potential future research priorities for external researchers as well as MSC’s Monitoring and Evaluation program.
Primary question
What is the evidence for impacts of the MSC program?
This question has the following components:
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Population Any harvester groups or chain of custody companies, governments, communities, biological populations and ecosystems potentially impacted by MSC certification or have the potential to become MSC certified and thereby potentially impacted by such certification.
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Intervention MSC certification (according to the MSC Fisheries or Chain of Custody standards).
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Comparator Absence of intervention either between fisheries, countries, sites or groups, and/or over time.
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Outcome Positive, negative, neutral or ambivalent impacts on ecosystems, trade, socio-economic outcomes, governance, management or policy.
Secondary questions
What are the characteristics of documented evidence in terms of geographic location, and focus of the study (e.g. consumer willingness to pay, program legitimacy and credibility, fisheries bycatch etc).
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What are the characteristics of the fisheries that are most reported in the literature?
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What are the primary disciplines that focus on the MSC programme and its effects?
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What study designs are used in research regarding the MSC programme?
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What are the types of outcomes (e.g. socio-economic, ecological, policy recommendations etc) for which evidence is documented?
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What is the frequency of these documented outcomes?
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What are the current knowledge clusters? To be identified by examining the characteristics of the fisheries, disciplines and study designs.
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Where do gaps exist in the evidence base that may be prioritised for future research?