Summary
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) aims to improve ocean health and promote a sustainable seafood market. However, demonstrating the impact of sustainability interventions is far from straightforward and Voluntary Standard Setters are being challenged to prove that this type of incentive system does indeed lead to environmental sustainability gains. Though in 20 years of MSC’s existence many studies have focused on the program's impacts ranging from fisheries management and consumer awareness to coastal communities' livelihoods and international law, there isn’t a clear overview on the state of knowledge and evidence base for claims of positive as well as negative outcomes. To better understand what is known about the program’s impacts and the quality of evidence available, MSC staff and external researchers joined forces to create a systematic map. This map collates and describes articles on the environmental, social, institutional and economic effects of the MSC, identifying the methods used to determine impacts, and highlighting knowledge gaps and clusters. In this webinar, the study first and senior authors Ashleigh Arton and Katie Longo, discuss the antecedents, results and implications of the work, in press in the Journal of Environmental Evidence.