Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) pre-assessment report data 2009-2019

An MSC pre-assessment is an optional rapid high-level audit against the MSC Fisheries Standard. This data set contains 77 publicly available pre-assessments from the years 2009 to 2019. Each report has been broken down to the Unit of Assessment level for the species, gear and area targeted, client and assessor information, the associated MSC certified fisheries where relevant, and the scoring assessment to the relevant Performance Indicator level.

This data set does NOT include all the pre-assessments ever conducted. Pre-assessments conducted confidentially are not included and reports published after 2016 were not required for the purposes of the project so most were excluded from data collection. However, some reports were collected before the project had been defined and so we have included those that were produced after 2016 in this dataset even though they were not used in the study, in case they could be of use to others.  

This information was collected for the purposes of a project run internally at the MSC and was accepted for publication in Fish and Fisheries (Rasal et al. in prep). The reports were sourced from various websites across the internet but a large proportion came from Fishery Progress and are shared with permission from Fishery Progress. Further details for these pre-assessments can be found at https://fisheryprogress.org/. Pre-assessment reports that were shared confidentially with the MSC directly by the client fisheries, totalling 182 reports, are not included in this public dataset. All MSC certification scores are available for each certified fishery in their Public Certification Reports, which are publicly available at https://fisheries.msc.org/en/fisheries/.

The downloadable excel document contains a sheet with descriptions of the column headers, and another sheet with the dataset contained.

Disclaimer:

This data has been manually collated by MSC from pre-assessment reports prepared by third party assessors. MSC carries out data assurance to a standard that is fit for the purpose the information is used for, including being complete, accurate and as up to date as possible.  If accuracy is paramount to a finite resolution, receivers are asked to validate data against publicly available pre-assessment reports. The MSC is not responsible for any issues arising to any parties as a result of any information provided therein.