Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 231

Have the desired outcomes (ecological/biological) been determined and

achieved?
Is there research, monitoring and evaluation deployed in support of the activities,
for continual improvement and adaptive management?
Are stakeholders involved in the processes of management, to ensure community
norms prevail?

Verification should provide for a consistent approach to assessment of each of these
six basic elements of the decision-making process. A prescription for verification
should ensure that the verification properly assesses how well the fishery or pro-
ducer meets the standard, as well as prescribing how the criteria and performance
indicators, weighting and grading/scoring, and the synthesis and reporting process
are to be used within the verification process.
The verification model described above is focused on outcomes, but it also allows
for the assessment to include progress towards achieving outcomes that might be
considered to be representative of a sustainable fishery. This includes processes and
procedures that may be in place in a fishery that will lead to sustainable outcomes
within an acceptable timeframe, and research projects that may provide information
to enable better analysis of existing issues to be undertaken, to better assess risks
and to provide more specific focus for assessment, restoration or mitigation efforts
in the fishery. The verification model must specify how each of these important
aspects of management should be weighted in the verification process, and identify
how the results of the assessment are to be synthesised and reported.
The structure of this assessment and verification approach describes how man-
agement processes and research support may be best assessed, but there is a risk
that any specific fishery being assessed may not attach an appropriate level of im-
portance to a specific aspect to ensure sustainable outcomes can be achieved. For
example, although a fishery may have research support programmes in place, and
be committing substantial resources to those programmes, they may not be suit-
ably focused on key issues of ecological sustainability. Therefore in the logic of an
effective verification approach, specific aspects may need to be weighted to reflect
the circumstances of a specific fishery or venture. Normally, an assessment would
be more heavily weighted towards the outcomes, since this is the achievement
of sustainability, and the management processes, procedures and information/data
support would normally be considered to be the important but supporting sets of
parameters, consistent with the concept of a balanced standard (section 10.4.5).

10.5.1 Verification cost versus quality
The verification by independent third-party certifiers that a fishery or aquaculture
venture complies with a sustainability standard is the consumer's main safeguard
against inappropriate awards of certification or ecolabel for a product.