Healthcheck Sustainability Indicator Reporting for Australian Fisheries

Verification of fisheries sustainability credentials is essential to increase consumer confidence, market access and community benefit. Sector performance currently centres on monitoring fish stocks and economic performance. However, markets and stakeholder organisations increasingly require traceable evidence of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) indicators such as provenance, safety, diversity, animal welfare, carbon, biodiversity to inform decisions. To meet this need, this project activates CSIROs Healthcheck ESG Fisheries data system by engaging industry and Indigenous leaders, management agencies and researchers to identify targeted indicators, collect data, prioritise data gaps to enable more comprehensive ESG reporting. The reporting system is designed to collect and report data which is ready for ingestion into existing catalogues and exchanges (e.g., Ag Food data Exchange). Data is compatible and interoperable for publishing to recognised sustainability framework reporting (e.g. Status of Australian Fish Stocks, Marine Stewardship Certification, National Fisheries Plan, UN SDGs, Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosure, Australian Agricultural Sustainability Framework, Agricultural Innovation Australia (AIA) Environmental Accounting Platform), and ready for supplying relevant indicators and data for Australia’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Sustainability Framework development. We demonstrate the capability of this sustainability data reporting system with selected fisheries. New indicators address climate impacts and adaptation responses, food safety systems, modern slavery protections, sector-led initiatives to improve ESG outcomes, Indigenous sector participation and economic development, among others. Using and building new digital and LLM (large language model) technologies to identify, screen and verify data sources, the sustainability reporting data system reflects global standards in traceability of data itself. Data provenance pipelines provide a pathway for repeatable, routine data extraction and reporting, and increase data accessibility for the Australian fisheries sector. Construction of these pipelines has highlighted critical gaps to address and what actions to take to overcome remaining limitations on data accessibility and shareability for key ESG reporting areas.