Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 224

Unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, a standard that allocates equal
weighting to both outcomes and processes is probably relatively unbiased for the
purposes of assessment of seafood sustainability.
Achieving this balance between processes and outcomes in an unbiased assess-
ment system gives effect to a basic principle of sustainability - the acknowledge-
ment that sustainability is a pathway of incremental improvement, and that progress
along that pathway depends on the presence, within a management system, of the
appropriate set of processes for maintaining the fishery or aquaculture venture at
the forefront of acceptable performance. Establishing the assessment standard to
include both processes and outcomes reduces the risk that, even if all the possible
sustainability outcomes are achieved by a fishery and it is fully in compliance with
a high ecological standard, it may lack the processes and management systems
to maintain such a high level of compliance. Without the supporting management
processes in place, the products may not deserve to be labelled as sustainable. This
is because the supporting management processes are probably required to keep a
close watch over fishery practices and detect any undesirable trends in factors that
could impact the fishery, or show trends in an unsustainable direction, even though
it may currently comply with the performance levels of sustainability. In short,
sustainability in fisheries and aquaculture management involves not only achieving
the desired outcomes, but also ensuring that there is a robust support system for
the maintenance of sustainability through the provision of an appropriate set of
management processes.
Without the use of a 'balanced' standard, a fishery may be incorrectly determined
to have achieved sustainability for having achieved a preponderance of processes,
or alternatively, of outcomes. For instance, a fishery or aquaculture venture that does
not achieve any ecologically acceptable outcomes may nonetheless be assessed as
being sustainable and in compliance with an unbalanced standard that focuses only,
or mainly, on having a range of important processes in place within the management
systems. This creates a serious difficulty, because even though the management
and support processes may be in place (e.g. a fishery may have a bycatch action
plan), they may not be effective or lead to acceptable outcomes (actual bycatch in
the fishery may be much greater than predicted in the action plan, and exceed a
reasonable benchmark for ecological sustainability). Thus, the fishery would not
be sustainable in the eyes of most consumers even though it may have what appears
to be an excellent set of verifiable management processes in place.
Creating an appropriate balance between elements of the standard and the assess-
ment procedures also requires careful consideration of the form of measures and
the benchmarks that constitute 'pass/fail' thresholds in the standard. For example,
a high-quality ecological standard would contain an absolute threshold that dis-
couraged a fishery from imposing any substantive risk of mortality on recognised
endangered species. This would be included in the standard as a form of 'failsafe'
threshold, so that no matter what impacts might be imposed by a fishery, any catch of
highly sensitive species would preclude achievement of the sustainability standard.