Initially revealed to Medium.com

As a member of the Patrick J. McGovern Basis’s (PJMF) 2023 Information to Safeguard Human Rights Accelerator program, FishWise and PJMF’s Information Observe crew have partnered to create a streamlined and systematic technique of detecting human and labor rights dangers in seafood provide chains.

by Adzan Adlan, Nahla Achi, Chris Younger, and Sara Lewis

Seafood corporations are more and more dedicated to accountable sourcing and are working to counter illicit habits of their provide chains. Nonetheless, present methodologies to evaluate unlawful, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, human, and labor rights dangers in seafood provide chains are resource-intensive, lack entry to vessel-level knowledge, and lack the essential evaluation essential to translate knowledge insights into subsequent actions for corporations. Leveraging knowledge to tell and prioritize motion on human rights is important for corporations to fulfill their business sustainability commitments. Many human and labor rights violations happen removed from shore, and vessel knowledge can present us with eyes and ears nearer to the water to assist illuminate suspicious exercise in provide chains and inform accountable sourcing choices.

Previously, FishWise addressed gaps in knowledge evaluation and data-informed suggestions for corporations by utilizing International Fishing Watch’s Vessel Viewer. Vessel Viewer supplied important vessel-level knowledge and preliminary knowledge insights, permitting us to supply seafood corporations actionable suggestions. Whereas this knowledge method served our crew for a time, the workflow was time-consuming, particularly in circumstances like shelf-stable tuna, the place sourcing may come from over 100 completely different vessels. It grew to become clear that we needed to rethink our knowledge technique.

We discovered a niche within the seafood sustainability house for a scalable vessel analytics resolution that detects the presence of particular threat indicators. The principle options of this analytics resolution would come with built-in, traceable seafood sourcing knowledge, detailed vessel id and exercise knowledge, and visualized key indicators of human and labor rights dangers on an interactive dashboard.

For this venture, FishWise used a number of software programming interfaces (APIs) from International Fishing Watch to extract detailed vessel id, exercise, and fishing occasion knowledge. Choices, a no-code guidelines engine, was used to retrieve and course of API calls and consider the information towards main indicators of human and labor rights dangers. The end result was interactive Tableau dashboards to visually illuminate probably illicit exercise in seafood corporations’ provide chains.

To supply this proof of idea, we did the next:

1. Collected a vessel record with vessel names and different identifiers (e.g., Worldwide Maritime Group (IMO) quantity, Maritime Cell Service Identities (MMSI) quantity)
2. Discovered matches for vessels within the record by way of International Fishing Watch’s vessel search API
3. Retrieved all vessel occasions for vessels within the record over our outlined time interval (2022) by querying the International Fishing Watch Occasions API and retrieved insights from all vessels within the record by querying the International Fishing Watch Insights API to focus on potential threat occasions
4. Retrieved port go to occasions knowledge to calculate time-at-sea for vessels within the record for an prolonged interval (2018–2022)
5. Parsed the aggregated occasion string for every vessel into discrete occasions and loaded them into occasion tables in Redshift
6. Saved indicators into the insights desk in Redshift and saved port visits into the time-at-sea desk
7. Constructed materialized views to affix insights and occasion tables for tables of particular person indicators (materialized views are the ultimate desk views to be used in our Tableau visualizations)
8. Loaded GeoSpatial polygons to show unique financial zones (EEZ), regional fisheries administration group (RFMO) zones, and marine protected areas (MPA)
9. Outlined relationships between vessel supply tables and created materialized views (in Redshift) for Tableau
10. Configured the information supply as an extract to enhance rendering/retrieval speeds (When working with an extract, we refreshed it each time there have been updates to the materialized views and supply tables by way of API.)

With these steps accomplished, we created the automated vessel threat indicator dashboards in Tableau. This vessel analytics resolution will assist retailers and suppliers implement due diligence to establish and handle human and labor rights dangers in provide chains.