Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 240

habitats), or to design effective measures to reduce those impacts. However, while
the environmental impact issues are probably the most poorly understood, all of the
sustainability issues suffer from data and information limitations. These include
predictions about the growth of fish stocks, impacts of specific harvest strategies
on stocks or on the habitats that are fished, the effect of changing feeding regime
in seacages on benthic fauna, or changes to gear types and at-sea product handling
procedures. And further, the extent to which a producer or a fishery consistently
applies specific improvements, and maintains the standards that are expected by
the management system and the consumers can be very difficult to determine with
accuracy or precision. So, in setting a standard, conducting a verification or as-
sessing the success of a seafood incentive programme, the way in which issues are
handled where there are gaps in key areas of information or high intrinsic levels of
uncertainty becomes very important.
In this field, the role of science in the verification is to be clear about the levels
of uncertainty that may apply to specific aspects of data and information, and
to provide for clear boundaries outside of which information and data may not be
reliable. Technical knowledge should also be used to provide for research to develop
better measures that can cope with uncertainty, and better models to interpret and
explore implications of uncertainty and knowledge gaps. In assessing the success
of a seafood incentive system, there needs to be clear analysis of how the system
deals with substantive gaps in knowledge that may lead to uncertainty about either
the details of the standard or the details of knowledge required in the verification
process. However, the most robust approach to gaps in knowledge and high levels of
uncertainty is to always require the verification process to apply a more conservative
judgement to issues where the data are limited or missing, or uncertainty is high.
This effectively reverses the burden of proof, so that producers and fishery managers
need to demonstrate that their impacts are not exceeding set levels, and ensures that
verification takes a suitably cautious approach to protect against false verifications
of compliance simply based on lack of appropriate knowledge - a central tenet of
the precautionary approach to sustainability (Caddy 1999, de la Mare 2005). Any
assessment of the success of an ecolabelling, certification or other forms of incentive
programme should therefore always consider the extent to which lack of data and
knowledge is treated in this precautionary manner by the verification system, and
rank the incentive system performance to reflect this approach to dealing with
uncertainty.
10.6.4 Timescales for improvement
To be successful, changes towards improved sustainability need to be carried out
within the context of any existing management system frameworks. For improve-
ments in environmental practices to be effective and long lasting, they need to be
well embedded within the fishery or aquaculture management system. However,
achieving this may take many years, depending on the type of change being sought
by the certification programme. Some of these changes may be costly, have a big