Alignment: ASC Farm Standard

Standard in development – ASC Farm Standard

The alignment process will lead to a single farm-level standard. The aim is to provide greater consistency and harmonise requirements across all farmed seafood species currently targeted by ASC.

Currently, ASC manages a number of separate farm standards covering different species. They all provide industry-leading, robust environmental and social requirements, but because they have been developed at different times their requirements vary on some of the impacts that are common across aquaculture.

The aligned Farm Standard will cover all impact areas in one rigorous standard, which includes species-specific requirements where relevant. This alignment will also allow the ASC to more efficiently expand its reach (e.g. adding production systems or new species) and will facilitate the swifter update to specific metrics.

Consultation best practice

ASC is the only aquaculture certification scheme to be a full member of the ISEAL Alliance, the global membership association for credible sustainability standards whose members meet internationally accepted best practices.

ASC’s public consultations follow ISEAL’s Code of Good Practice for Setting Social and Environmental Standards, which stipulates that stakeholders have sufficient time and opportunity to provide input on the standard and can see how their input has been taken into account.

Next steps

The ASC Farm Standard will capture evolving best social and environmental aquaculture practices and be streamlined to ensure consistent auditing is possible. Feedback from all consultations is being used to adapt the proposals. The Farm Standard’s P1 and P3 requirements, covering legal and social indicators respectively, are part of the current public consultation, which runs until April 30^th 2022, and are due to be released in 2022. All P2 Criteria except for Fish Welfare elements are also part of the current public consultation, together with P1 and P3. Fish Welfare has been consulted on in September/October 2021. After all feedback has been collated and reflected upon, a final round of public consultation on the complete proposed P2 will take place in September 2022, with pilots running in parallel. The ASC Farm Standard is scheduled for release in 2023 and targeted to become operational in 2024.

Timeline