Diversified Communications and SeaWeb have introduced the winners of the 2019 Seafood Champion Awards. The awards honor seafood sustainability leaders who exemplify the creativity and dedication of seafood leaders around the world.
These 12 months’ winners constitute exchange and progress at many distinct ranges, from converting how a country perceives sustainable seafood to converting industry and deliver chains, how governments adjust fisheries and put into effect the regulation and how individuals and groups guide and advantage from sustainable fisheries. Since 2006, the once-a-year Seafood Champion Awards have identified people and companies for excellence in selling environmentally accountable seafood. This 12 months’ 4 winners—one in every of the 4 Award categories—had been introduced on June 11 in front of a worldwide audience on the SeaWeb Seafood Summit in Bangkok, Thailand, in a rite that also honored the finalists.
The Seafood Champion Award for Leadership went to Wakao Hanaoka, founder and CEO of Seafood Legacy. With his strong ardor for sustainable oceans, Wakao has been the main of Japan’s sustainable seafood movement for extra than 15 years. Since the established order of Seafood Legacy in 2015, Wakao has focused on constructing Japan-centric answers for seafood sustainability by addressing the importance of domestic, commercial enterprise-led initiatives that force regulatory reforms. This method is constructed upon the maximum essential price in the Japanese business way of life: Concord. Wakao’s strong initiative, now blended with the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, is making seafood sustainability a brand new norm in Japan.
OceanMind is the 2019 Seafood Champion Award winner for Innovation. Incubated at the Pew Charitable Trusts, OceanMind (OM) brings a unique approach to vessel tracking, control, and surveillance (MCS), one that combines technological gear and regulation-enforcement-style capacity building to create a way of life of compliance inside the oversight of a rustic’s fishing fleet. A few years in the past, OceanMind added its progressive approach and potential to build robust partnerships to pursue a program of work with the Royal Thai Government’s Department of Fisheries (DOF) to offer MCS help and to build capacity because the authorities created corporations, procedures, and onboard era to benefit manage over their vast business fishing fleet. OceanMind worked carefully with the DOF, helping scientists to end up compliance officers and learn how to use the equipment and structures newly available to them.
In the Seafood Champion Award Vision category, Dr. Darian McBain received for her paintings over the past 5 years, which has converted Thai Union into a frontrunner in sustainability now not handiest within the seafood industry but as an alternative, the foodservice enterprise as an entire, as noted in the 2018 Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Through SeaChange, a complete set of commitments and moves to make sure that Thai Union is operating sustainably, Darian is working at each stage of the seafood industry – from vessels and manufacturing to importers and stores. Her work makes a specialty of number sustainability demanding situations inside the seafood enterprise: human rights abuses, migrant and labor problems, and environmental and weather trade threats. Darian also leads the employer’s commitments and pledges on global systems and the United Nations and World Economic Forum. Partnerships and collaboration have been given a robust awareness to allow the SeaChange approach.
Francisco Blaha was chosen because of the winner of the Seafood Champion Award for Advocacy. A fisher, a scientist, fisheries inspector, ICT developer, and communicator, Francisco brings a unique angle and credibility of exceptional but complementary organizations in fisheries. A believer within the “sanitizing” electricity of records and an innovator in his technique to electronic Catch Documentation Schemes, his ideas had been adopted by the WWF professional panel on prison and traceable fish merchandise, FAO’s expert consultation of CDS, and through the book of FAO Fisheries Technical Paper (TP619) Seafood traceability for fisheries compliance which he authored. He is an avid fisheries communicator, imparting technical records in plain languag, emphasizingn sustainability, transparency, elimination of subsidies, MCS, gender stability, and labor rights for fishers and observers. Francisco has contributed to sustainable seafood maximum via his work in capability building, having skilled masses of people in 50 nations on regions key to legality, protection, and sustainability.
“We regularly measure progress in records, graphs, and metrics, but the Seafood Champion Awards placed faces and stories to the brilliant progress accomplished in sustainable seafood,” said Meghan Jeans, SeaWeb Program Director with The Ocean Foundation.
