National Geographic - Ocean Views

Sustainable businesses have made huge strides in areas like improving access to renewable energy and improving health outcomes for the world’s poor, and we believe there’s an opportunity in the seafood sector as well. The big question is, how do we help seafood entrepreneurs design businesses that have positive social and environmental impacts?

How can seafood businesses create positive impacts?

The 80+ entrepreneurs that have entered the competition operate at different points in the seafood supply chain, at different scales, and in different geographies. There are potential environmental benefits that can be generated by each venture, including impacts on habitats, fisheries management, energy and water use, or other resources. Social impacts can range from creating access to fresh food in places where distribution channels do not reach, to breaking up price controls on fishing docks, to fair labor practices.

Avoid the negative in addition to creating the positive

Each company must plan and define their impacts in a way that makes sense for their specific business. They must set goals for creating positive impacts and, at the same time, ensure they are not unintentionally creating negative impacts, by looking at their own operations and at the supply chains that carry products into and out of their enterprise. For example, requiring seafood suppliers to have fair labor policies in place can mitigate the potential for slave labor to be found in businesses’ supply chains. We believe this absence of the negative is as powerful as the presence of the positive.

Measure impact in the course of business

Fish 2.0 has developed a structure to assist seafood businesses in defining and communicating the metrics they can use to quantify and prove the changes they are making. We are asking entrepreneurs to articulate specific, measurable outcomes that they can control andfishing.jpg are directly linked to the daily operations of their businesses.

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