To ensure against these unintended impacts, we start by screening fisheries for several enabling conditions, including that access is limited to the fishery, and target species are biologically resilient. We also developed a suite of both intrinsic and conditional ‘safeguards’, including systematic assessment to identify risks; third-party environmental validation to improve trust and easily communicate improvement actions; and conservation covenants to protect against overfishing and habitat destruction. With these safeguards in place, SmartFish NGO is gearing up to replicate nationally, aiming to directly empower more than , Mexican fishers by .

PeskAAS continues to evolve in Timor-Leste, with a particular focus on improving fisher involvement and use. Our next goal, in response to feedback from local fishers, is to develop a personalised ‘fisher module’ that will provide fishers with a way of tracking their own activities – for example, providing a platform for them to log expenditure on inputs like ice, bait and fuel, as a way of better understanding profit margins, checking market prices for different fish species, and monitoring earnings. This project is already underway in Malaysia, prior to deployment at other sites.

To overcome this issue, we approached the communities one-by-one and held discussions with them in partnership with the Department of Fisheries – as a result, we were able to gain a better understanding of the fishers’ needs, and show how such a tool could help them. Involving fishers in the design of PeskAAS highlighted the need and mechanism for frequent feedback via municipal fisheries officers, which also helped establish local acceptance.

We will consider your questions, concerns and complaints to work out what steps can be taken in response. If you make a complaint which requires detailed consideration or investigation, we may ask you to give us more information about your complaint and the outcome you are seeking. We may need to gather relevant facts, locate and review relevant documents and speak with other people involved. In any event, we will endeavour to provide you with a response within days.

The roadmap to fisheries sustainability is clear – where science-based management has been intensely applied, fish stocks are now healthy or improving. The problem lies in that we still lack reliable information about the health of the stocks which make up at least half of the world’s catch, thus the prognosis of their stock status is that most will continue to be overfished. These data-limited fisheries are critical for food security and micronutrient requirements in some of the world’s poorest communities. Greater investment in fisheries management systems will lead to healthier fish populations, to the benefit of all the communities that rely upon them.