tami weiss

I wrote a guest post for the FishWise blog!

My post was a review of the journal article entitled “Global Cooperation among Diverse Organizations to Reduce Illegal Fishing in the Southern Ocean.” As it turns out, collaboration between diverse organizations can go a long way toward addressing international governance issues. In fact, the authors ended by saying that this one case study shows that international environmental issues don’t necessarily depend of the creation of new governmental regimes, they can be addressed through existing organizational networks.

The graph below is from the article and shows the weight of tooth fish caught by IUU fishing in the Southern Ocean between 1995 and 2009.

Link: http://www.fishwise.org/press/blog/141-reducing-illegal-unregulated-and-unreported-iuu-fishing

So what exactly is FishWise? And more importantly why would someone want to be fish wise?

According to their website “FishWise  is non-profit organization that promotes the health and recovery of ocean ecosystems by providing innovative market-based tools to the seafood industry.” In normal English, that means that FishWise works with seafood businesses to help them improve their traceability systems. They can also conduct risk assessments to identify products that are likely to be untraceable or coming from illegal sources. They work with companies like Target, Safeway, New Leaf and Bi-Rite to help them publicly communicate their commitment to sustainability and transparency, and improve their product mix over time.

So why would someone want to be fish wise? So that you can be certain the fish you’re enjoying contributes to the well being of the worlds ocean, instead of depleting it.