The Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP), in collaboration with the Hilborn Lab at the University of Washington, has released the eighth edition of its Fishery Improvement Projects Database (FIB-DB), offering what organizers describe as one of the most comprehensive looks yet at how fishery improvement projects have taken shape over the past two decades.
The publicly available database compiles and standardizes information from platforms including SFP’s Improvement Projects Tracker and FisheryProgress.org, providing both historical and real-time insight into the global FIP landscape. With records spanning more than 20 years, the dataset tracks how these projects have expanded in scale, geography, and scope.
According to SFP, the latest version underscores steady growth across the sector. FIPs have increased not only in number but also in “geographic reach, diversity of species covered, and range of fisheries engaged,” reflecting what the organization calls a broader shift toward collaborative management and market-driven sustainability efforts.
“FIPs have emerged as one of the leading market-based approaches for delivering improvements in fisheries supplying global seafood markets, with more than 350 projects initiated to date,” said Indrani Lutchman, SFP’s program director of FIP evaluation and external relations. “With each new version of the database, we are better able to capture the scale, diversity, and progress of these efforts, and provide the structured data needed for scientific and robust analyses of their impact.”
The 2026 update introduces new tools aimed at sharpening that analysis. Among them are FIP stage indicators, designed to track how projects are progressing against workplans, and the integration of FAO Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries identifiers, which link projects more directly to specific fisheries and stocks.
Researchers say that kind of structure is critical. “Research investigating the emergence and effect of sustainability-related actions requires knowledge of what has been done, where, how, by whom, and with what results,” said Dianty Ningrum of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. “Datasets like the FIP-DB are an important for building such knowledge.”
Alongside the database, SFP has also updated its interactive dashboard, allowing users to explore trends in FIP growth, species coverage, and performance over time—offering a clearer picture of where improvement efforts are gaining traction across the global seafood sector.
