projects
Seafood sustainability is not a joke While seafood represents one of the most widely traded food commodities globally, it remains among the most misunderstood by consumers. The VeriFish project is introducing card games, infographics, posters and calendars to highlight key sustainability indicators, helping players—ahem—consumers understand what makes a fishery more (or less) sustainable.
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hen we began the VeriFish project in May 2024, together with colleagues from eight institutes across eight different countries, we didn’t know each other yet—but we knew we were facing a very challenging task: to make the complexity behind fish sustainability understandable to stakeholders in the seafood value chain by introducing an approach that was as transparent, verifiable, and widely accepted as possible among all involved actors. The VeriFish Indicator Framework was therefore conceived as an “impartial” tool, based on data collected by scientists, researchers, and industry experts in Europe and around the world, organized into databases (FAO Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries (GRSF), EuroFIR’s FoodExplorer database, Fishsource, SeafoodWatch, to cite a few), and analysed according to FAIR scientific practices. The VeriFish indicator framework has become our reference matrix bringing together all the variables that should be taken into consideration when discussing a sustainable seafood supply chain. Within the VeriFish indicator framework (released in April 2025), information about sustainability, provenance, and nutrition is available in one place. We
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needed to demonstrate that this wealth of data, made available for the first time in its entirety, could be used to explain the complexity of sustainable fishing.
Media products targeting European families, citizens and younger generations Among the VeriFish project’s targets are families, young people, and, more generally, all of us as consumers. This includes environmental and ethical consumers who are motivated by environmental sustainability and ethical consideration. There are familiarity-driven consumers who stick to familiar fish types due to a lack of knowledge about selecting and preparing different species. There are also health-conscious consumers who look for nutritional benefits of food, and seafood. To help disseminate this information to all these types of consumers— both adults and children—VeriFish is releasing card games, infographics, posters and calendars and a recipe book that translate complex sustainability, nutrition, and provenance data into accessible and engaging formats. These
products aim to promote informed seafood choices, increase visibility of under-communicated fisheries and aquaculture products and foster awareness about the environmental and socio-economic dimensions of seafood.
Scientific based, focusing on specific species VeriFish media products address sustainability challenges by relying on verifiable information and scientifically accurate data sources, as presented in the VeriFish indicator framework. To make the materials appealing, the media products focus on some specific species, offering real life examples that consumers and consumer associations, parents and educators recognise in their everyday lives. For this purpose, the most consumed species in the EU-27 countries according to the EU FISH MARKET 2024 report have been analysed. As VeriFish needs to address several objectives, further considerations were made in order to come up with species variety to reflect these different objectives. Namely: • Sustainability aspects can be clearly explained with the species (invasive species, cephalopods)
Eurofish Magazine 6/2025
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