Courtesy of Seafood Watch And Monterey Bay Aquarium:

Seafood Watch assesses the sustainability of fisheries and fish farms by compiling relevant science-based information and evaluating that information against our standards. We periodically revise our standards to ensure we take into account developments in the scientific understanding of the impacts of fisheries and aquaculture operations, as well as in our understanding of what producers and managers can do to mitigate those impacts.

We are now collecting public comments on proposed modifications to the Standard for Wild Fisheries and Standard for Aquaculture. All comments on other areas of the standards will be considered during the next Seafood Watch Standards Revision process in 2019. This fourth public comment period will end September 18, 2016. We greatly value your input into how we can better meet our objectives in assessing fisheries and fish farms. We encourage you to view background information on the revision process and submit comments by visiting our website. The solicitation for this public comment period is under the heading Public Consultation 4.

Our intent with these changes is to improve clarity and ease of use of the standard, but there are two areas which could potentially be more substantive. These are 1) when to use the Unknown Bycatch Matrices in Criterion 2 in the Standard for Wild Fisheries and 2) the appropriate assumed percentage of harvested farmed fish byproduct used for further protein production in Criterion 5 in the Standard for Aquaculture. Comments on these aspects in particular would be useful.

The Aquaculture Standards and Comment Form can be found on the website with further instructions.