Some of you may recall that earlier this year we went public with a new initiative, Target 75, calling on the industry to work together to ensure that at least 75 percent of the world’s seafood could be classified as “sustainable” or “improving” by the end of 2020.
Since then, we haven’t made a lot of public announcements about the initiative, and to the average viewer it might seem like there hasn’t been a lot happening. I wanted to update you here on the blog, to talk about what we’ve been doing and to preview some announcements that we’ll be making in the near future on this exciting new movement.
For starters, while we may have been light on official, big public statements so far, we’ve been anything but quiet on the subject. We presented two webinars earlier this year on Target 75 (or “T75”), one to the industry and one to the NGO community, where we talked at length about our goals for the initiative and how we think we can get there. We’ve also been discussing T75 in person virtually non-stop, from one-on-one meetings with some of our industrial and NGO partners to appearances at events such as our forum in Indonesia in November and the Conservation Alliance for Sustainable Solutions annual meeting earlier this month.
A lot more work has been going on behind the scenes, which we’ll be discussing publicly starting in January. Of particular interest, we’ll be releasing a series of reports during the first half of 2018. Each report will go into detail regarding one of the sectors we are tracking as part of the T75 initiative. We’ll discuss the state of the species in each sector, where they come from, who is buying them, how far global production needs to go to become a contributor to T75, and most importantly, what needs to be done next in the sector to continue a trend toward our goal. These reports have been a long time coming, perhaps a little longer than we wanted, in truth, but trying to classify a large percentage of the world’s seafood production is a vast and complex task. Despite this challenge, our staff of experts have done a fantastic job and we look forward to sharing the results of all this hard work with the public starting next month.
We’re not stopping there—we intend to build on these reports with targeted advice to the sectors in general. We want anyone who is a buyer in a particular sector to know what they can do to help. Look for SFP to be discussing this initiative anywhere and everywhere we can, from public statements on the state of various sectors to appearances at even more events where we can bring our message to as many industrial stakeholders as possible.
Earlier, I described the initiative as a “movement,” and it is. While we’ve always believed (and still do) that sustainable seafood production makes good business sense, it’s not just about the bottom line—SFP also wants this initiative to succeed because it will help protect the oceans and the ecosystem that lives in them. As we said back in June, this initiative is both a challenge and an invitation to the seafood industry: Help us to support a movement that is bigger than all of us.
To learn more about Target 75, click here to download a document that explains the initiative in detail.