The global seafood industry is a vital source of food, livelihoods, culture, and income. Seafood supply is increasing, despite declining capture fisheries globally, due to significant advances in aquaculture, that is, the cultivation of aquatic organisms, which still relies on wild fish for feed. But seafood demand is also increasing, with a growing human population, affluence, and per capita consumption. Thus the sustainability of seafood systems has ethical implications, inter alia, for global food security, resource equity, and ecological integrity. Consumer demand for sustainable and ethical seafood, particularly in Europe and North America, is influencing the global market. But while NGO-driven certification schemes aid consumers in purchasing decisions, their benefits to the environment and small-scale producers are questionable.
The eSEAS project explores new ways of securing seafood sustainability by embedding values and ethics into marine resource management, policy, and governance. Decisions of how to manage, allocate, and reconcile conflicts related to marine resources are problems of both science and ethics. Scientific approaches to fisheries management are well developed, but ethical approaches to reconciling their inherent policy tradeoffs are nascent. Management goals are ultimately statements of values, but their explicit articulation is often absent in management frameworks. However, value considerations can aid decision-makers in resolving trade-offs that emerge at the science-policy nexus. An ethical approach offers an integrated approach to sustainability by making plural human values explicit to resolve ‘wicked problems’ stemming from value-based trade-offs and ethical dilemmas among diverse stakeholders and citizens. This can facilitate more inclusive, transparent, and accountable decision-making. Through public engagement and dissemination of transdisciplinary research, eSEAS is catalyzing a science-society dialogue and collective actions to enhance seafood ethics and sustainability.
eSEAS’ objectives are threefold: 1. to promote cutting-edge, transdisciplinary research in the nascent field of seafood ethics; 2. to develop three innovative multidisciplinary ‘fit-for-purpose’ deliberation and decision-support tools to enhance seafood ethics and sustainability; and 3. to implement ethical approaches to European management challenges, including the complex multi-jurisdictional Norwegian-spring spawning herring fisheries. Seafood ethics is defined as the empirical (descriptive and evaluative) study and normative reflection of values, value-based tradeoffs, and ethical dilemmas of stakeholders and citizens interacting across seafood value chains. By elucidating both facts and values, seafood ethics offers a deliberation and decision-support framework for sustainable and just fisheries management. This also can contribute to more ethical governance, which encompasses participatory, transparent, deliberative, and accountable decision-making that is designed to synthesize diverse sources of knowledge and to reconcile a plurality of values among stakeholders and citizens.
