Diversified Communications and SeaWeb have announced 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 sector.
This yr’s winners represent exchange and progress at many different tiers, from changing how a rustic perceive sustainable seafood to breaking industry and supply chains, how governments modify fisheries and enforce the law, and how individuals and groups support and advantage from sustainable fisheries. Since 2006, the annual Seafood Champion Awards have diagnosed individuals and companies for excellence in selling environmentally accountable seafood. This yr’s four winners—one in each of four Award classes—were introduced on June eleven in front of a worldwide target market on the SeaWeb Seafood Summit in Bangkok, Thailand, in a ceremony commemorated the finalists.
The Seafood Champion Award for Leadership went to Wakao Hanaoka, founder and CEO of Seafood Legacy. With his robust ardor for sustainable oceans, Wakao has been the main Japan’s sustainable seafood motion for greater than 15 years. Since the status quo of Seafood Legacy in 2015, Wakao has focused on building Japan-centric answers for seafood sustainability using addressing the significance of home, commercial enterprise-led projects that power regulatory reforms. This technique is constructed upon the maximum significant cost in the Japanese enterprise subculture: Concord. Wakao’s sturdy initiative, now blended with the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, is making seafood sustainability a 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 method to vessel tracking, manipulation, and surveillance (MCS), combining technological tools and regulation-enforcement-fashion capacity to create a tradition of compliance within the oversight of a country’s fishing fleet. A few years ago, OceanMind delivered its progressive method and capability to build strong partnerships to pursue a software of labor with the Royal Thai Government’s Department of Fisheries (DOF) to offer MCS assist and to construct potential, as the government created corporations, procedures and onboard generation to gain control over their substantial industrial fishing fleet. OceanMind labored carefully with the DOF, supporting scientists to become compliance officials and learn how to use the tools and structures newly to be had to them.
In the Seafood Champion Award Vision class, Dr. Darian McBain received for her paintings over the past five years, which has transformed Thai Union into a leader in sustainability not best inside the seafood industry however instead, the foodservice enterprise as an entire, as stated in the 2018 Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Through SeaChange, a comprehensive set of commitments and movements to ensure that the Thai Union is operating sustainably, Darian runs at every level of the seafood enterprise – from vessels and production to importers and stores. Her paintings specialize in a range of sustainability challenges within the seafood enterprise: human rights abuses, migrant and labor problems, and environmental and climate change threats. Darian also leads the enterprise’s commitments and pledges on global systems and the United Nations and World Economic Forum. Partnerships and collaboration were given an intense focus to allow the SeaChange strategy.
Francisco Blaha became 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 perspective and credibility to very extraordinary but complementary groups in fisheries. A believer in the “sanitizing” power of data and an innovator in his technique to electronic Catch Documentation Schemes, his concepts were adopted via the WWF professional panel on prison and traceable fish merchandise, FAO’s professional session 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 language, emphasizing sustainability, transparency, elimination of subsidies, MCS, gender stability, and labor rights for fishers and observers. Francisco has contributed to sustainable seafood most via his paintings in the potential building, having skilled human beings in 50 international locations on regions key to legality, safety, and sustainability.
