Just over four years ago, WWF-UK kicked off a new and ambitious business partnership, collaborating with the seafood company Thai Union, with the shared aim of improving the environmental sustainability of seafood supply chains in Europe.

Our journey started with the signing of WWF’s Seafood Charter, which contains a set of principles and steps aimed at guiding the industry towards tackling key challenges, including ensuring seafood is traceable, increasing transparency and implementing projects to reduce the impact of fishing practices on the environment. Thai Union’s sustainability commitments have since grown with the launch of their global SeaChange® sustainability strategy, through which the company has committed to source its branded tuna from fisheries that are either Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certified or engaged in fishery improvement projects aimed at meeting the MSC.

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Picture this: it’s summertime and you are enjoying a plate of Old Bay-smothered crab cakes at a seaside restaurant in Maryland. You might assume that the crab meat on your plate was sourced locally, considering the blue crab is a well-known Maryland symbol, and a powerful icon of much of the mid-Atlantic region. Pre-1990s, that assumption would most likely be correct. The Chesapeake blue crab fishery was the most valuable fishery in the Bay at the time and it met most of the demand for the species in the region. In fact, until the 1990s, most crab meat consumed in the United States came from domestic sources. This all changed when the major domestic blue crab fisheries, like those in the Chesapeake Bay, were overfished to the brink of collapse – in large part due to a lack of sustainable fishery management.

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