Advancing the Crucial Notion of “Interoperability” in Catch Documentation Schemes

ABSTRACT Catch documentation schemes (CDS) use validated documents such as catch certificates to establish and track the legal provenance of fish, thereby aiming to reduce the flow of illegal fishing products into markets. When a CDS is implemented independently to protect a single market, an inherent risk is that illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing products will be diverted to other supply chains, including those with weaker CDS. The recent proliferation of such CDS has resulted in more types of catch certificates in circulation. This can lead to inadvertently increasing opportunities for laundering uncertified fish when these CDS lack internal and external mechanisms to prevent attaching catch certificates to fish that do not actually have legal provenance. To support essential and effective cooperation, CDS that currently operate independently should actively promote interoperability to facilitate data exchange and prevent fraud. Recently announced improvements to the European Union's (EU) CDS address these issues and boost the prospects for interoperability between the world's largest CDS and other CDS with compatible designs. This invites collaboration with new and still evolving CDS, such as the one recently implemented by Japan based on the EU model, to their individual and collective advantage. Interoperability is possible at levels ranging from manual, case‐specific investigation of suspicious shipments to automated cross‐checks between systems or even a fully integrated “super CDS”. Increasing cooperation amongst schemes, grounded in design‐based and functional interoperability, is expected to lead to stronger ring‐fencing of and measurable reductions of IUU fishing products in CDS‐protected markets.