Ahead of the 29th regular meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), occurring 17-24 November 2025, the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) has released its position statement outlining several issues it wants ICCAT to act on.
Saying that it has been encouraged by the Commission’s ongoing momentum towards stronger, science-based management, ISSF is urging ICCAT parties to build on that progress by focusing on three critical and complementary priorities: finalising harvest strategies for key stocks, scaling up electronic monitoring (EM) and human observer coverage, and advancing bycatch mitigation and shark conservation.
Together, these actions can accelerate ICCAT’s transition to fully monitored and evidence-driven fisheries management, it said.
According to ISSF, ICCAT has become a leader among tuna RFMOs in adopting harvest strategies, also known as management procedures (MPs), which are frameworks that use pre-agreed rules to adjust fishing opportunities based on stock status indicators. MPs replace short-term negotiations with predictable, transparent, and precautionary decision-making.
Following the successful adoption of MPs for northern albacore, Atlantic bluefin tuna, and north Atlantic swordfish, ICCAT scientists and managers have developed candidate MPs for western Atlantic skipjack that are ready for adoption. ICCAT must now adopt this MP in 2025, ISSF said.
It is also urging ICCAT to accelerate progress on multi-stock harvest strategies for bigeye, yellowfin, and eastern skipjack, as well as for southern Atlantic albacore.
Several Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)-certified fisheries that catch southern Atlantic albacore have deadlines to implement MPs by 2028–2029. By acting decisively, ICCAT can help fleets close MSC conditions and demonstrate leadership in adopting tools to ensure precautionary decision-making, ISSF said.
It is also calling for ICCAT to increase observer coverage to at least 20%, as recommended in the past by ICCAT scientists, as an interim goal and to establish a clear timeline to reach 100% coverage in industrial tuna fisheries, including during at-sea transshipments.
EM technologies make that goal attainable, it said, adding that ISSF’s own research and advocacy – from pilot EM trials on tropical tuna vessels to collaborative workshops with RFMOs and companies – have helped demonstrate EM’s feasibility.
By enabling electronic monitoring to count toward ICCAT’s current observer requirements, the Commission can improve data quality, incentivise implementation of EM, and ensure fleets are meeting the current minimum observer coverage levels — a win-win for science-based management, it said.
Shark conservation is a particularly urgent priority this year, ISSF highlighted. Both North and South Atlantic shortfin mako populations remain overfished and subject to overfishing, according to the 2025 SCRS report. For the northern stock, any catch retention impedes recovery; for the southern stock, total removals must remain below 1,295 tonnes to stay within the scientific advice.
ISSF supports a full retention ban for the North Atlantic and catch limits for the South Atlantic that account for all sources of mortality, including dead discards and post-release losses. At the same time, it wants ICCAT to modernise its finning regulation by requiring sharks to be landed with fins naturally attached with no exceptions, explaining that this rule improves enforcement and data accuracy while helping to curb illegal finning.
