At face value, trade agreements may seem like an unusual avenue for saving the planet. But they increasingly require all members to align their national environmental legislations with ‘best practice’, in exchange for market access between member states – not necessarily for the health of the planet, but because unequal policies create an unequal economic playing field, giving countries with less effective governance a competitive advantage

To characterise marine biodiversity based on eDNA we require a library of references. That way, we can look up the snippets of DNA found in seawater and identify all the species present in our samples, similar to a dictionary. Unfortunately, to date only one per cent of the , known species of marine fish have had their genome sequenced. In collaboration with our global partners, one of OceanOmics’ ambitious goals is to generate and release to the public the reference genomic resources for thousands of marine species; and by doing so empower conservation science.

SmartFish Inc., the business side, sells their catch into more profitable markets, rewarding fishers like Porfirio for their more responsible fishing and incentivizing them to further improve their performance. Core to SmartFish Inc’s model are shorter supply chains, rigorous sourcing policies, comprehensive traceability systems and full transparency, including open-book’ negotiations. Unfortunately, these basic approaches are lamentably unusual in the extremely opaque seafood sector.

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 .

In , the highly-publicised collapse of a major Canadian cod stock focused global attention on the urgent need to stop overfishing – and better manage our fisheries. Similar declines in fish stocks have played out across major fisheries globally in the last half-century where abundance data is available: in Argentina, Canada, Chile, Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Peru, South Africa and the United States, and on the high seas, leading to the implementation of catch and effort restrictions.