SGS Product & Process Certification - Marine Stewardship Council

9.2.2 SICA
A SICA proceeds in several steps. These steps and the results of the consequent stages are
described here.
Scoping for risk-causing activities:
As a first step, the stakeholder group must decide on a list of activities that may have an impact
on the target species population, other species, habitat or ecosystem. Based on the expert
judgment of the assessment team members and stakeholders present at the meeting, the
activities that may cause a risk to the different components were identified and evaluated
qualitatively. The results of this first step are presented in Table 3.
Table 3. Identification table of risk causing effects (** = risk causing effect, * = little effect, - =
no effect, Na = not applicable)
Activity Stock By catch Discard ETP Habitat Ecosystem
Direct
Capture
** * - - - -
Gear loss * * Na Na - *
Unobserved
mortality
* * Na Na Na -
Discarding
Other:
* * Na Na Na Na
Bait collection - - - - * -
Steaming - - - * - -
Anchoring - - - - * -
Littering - - - - * -
From this rather subjective analysis it was concluded that the ‗worst plausible case‘ is the
impact of the fishery (direct capture) on the sea bass stock (sub-component) in the North Sea.
Scale and intensity of fishery. In the second step of the SICA, the stakeholder group is asked
to consider the spatial scale, the temporal scale and the intensity of each activity, in this case
the direct capture of sea bass (Table 4). These scores do not feed directly into the final score
for the SICA, but help to start off the discussion and ease participants into the idea of allocating
scores.
Spatial scale
The spatial scale score depends on the overlap of the activity with the geographical distribution
of the stock. A spatial scale score of 4 was given because the UoC fishes for sea bass over a
wide area of the southern North Sea, but less than 50% of the stock‘s geographical range.
Temporal scale
Though the UoC takes place during about 60-90 days in a year, a temporal scale score of 4
was given because there are other seasonal fisheries for bass in coastal areas of the North
Sea and in the eastern English Channel Therefore it has been assumed that the fishery for
bass takes place during 100-200 days a year.
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