Resource: Critical Review of the Marine Stewardship Council Draft Assessment of Skeena and Nass River Sockeye Fisheries
Authors / Publisher: Aaron Hill, for Watershed Watch Salmon Society
Date: November 2007
Summary:
The purpose of the document Critical Review of the Marine Stewardship Council Draft Assessment of Skeena and Nass River Sockeye Fisheries is to provide critical analyses of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) draft assessments for the Skeena and Nass sockeye fisheries, and also to provide recommendations to the MSC assessment team based on those analyses. This review was commissioned by the Watershed Watch Salmon Society as part of a Marine Conservation Caucus initiative.
The Skeena and Nass watersheds are adjacent, their associated marine fisheries interceptions overlap substantially, and both fisheries are managed by DFO North Coast; therefore many issues discussed in this review are common to both fisheries. Initial reviews of the 2004 DFO self-evaluations, the 2005 independent reviews commissioned by the Sierra Club of Canada’s BC Chapter (SCBC), and the August 2007 MSC Draft Assessment (All documents available at: http://www.msc.org/html/content_493.htm), and consultations with regional experts, led to the conclusion that conditional certification was likely warranted for the Nass fishery, but not the Skeena fishery. Therefore, given limited time and resources, the MSC Draft Assessment of the Skeena fishery received much more scrutiny in this review than that of the Nass fishery.