The Avoid and Reduce Overexploitation target focuses on wild catch fisheries. It helps companies avoid reliance on overexploited stocks and encourages engagement in seascapes and jurisdictions to improve conditions for fisheries and reduce overfishing.

This target is for companies with wild-catch seafood in their operations or supply chain, including aquaculture fish feed from wild catch fisheries.

Each Ocean target has a series of different pathways that allow for multiple approaches to target-setting, depending on a company’s context.

Avoid and Reduce Overexploitation Target Pathways:

• Reduce sourcing & Engage – when stocks have been overfished or experienced overfishing for more than one generation time (GT) or more than five years, companies commit to reduce sourcing from that fishery
• Cap sourcing & Engage – when stocks have been overfished or experienced overfishing for less than one generation time (GT) or more than five years, or when there is insufficient data to set a quantifiable Reduction target, companies commit to cap sourcing from that fishery
• Engagement – when relevant stocks are not found to be overfished or experiencing overfishing but are still prioritized for engagement (e.g. because it is in a high biodiversity area), fisheries commit to engage in improvement initiatives
• Cease to source – a measure of last resort when prior targets have not achieved the management and stock health outcomes necessary for stock recovery by the target end date; companies commit to ceasing to source from a fishery.