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Centre Director Professor Jan Bebbington is working with Stockholm Resilience Centre on the SeaBOS project.
The collaboration seeks to identify and work in partnership with ‘keystone actors’ in the seafood industry. A keystone actor is an organisation that is both ecologically and economically significant. The theory of change that is being employed is that if large companies who are motivated to achieve a step change in sustainability performance work in a scientifically supported manner to change their impacts and activities, then the industry will change as a result of their leadership. The Stockholm Resilience Centre, who lead the project, have developed a unique interaction with nine of the world's largest seafood companies to realise this ambition: the Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship initiative. The research team working alongside this initiative are undertaking two forms of investigation:
- Science for SeaBOS: synthesising existing knowledge and developing new insights into ocean stewardship in order to support SeaBOS ambitions;
- Science of SeaBOS: studying the initiative as it progresses to understand how business changes in response to stewardship ambitions and within a science-business partnership.
There is more information on the keystone actor approach created by the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
The work developing the keystone actors concept is primarily funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, the Beijer Foundation, the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, and the Erling-Persson Family Foundation.
At the United Nations Ocean Conference in Lisbon in June 2022, the SeaBOS cohort of companies published their first progress report that reflects on the past five years of their activities.
SeaBOS is a separate body from the researchers who they collaborate with and their webpages offer an array of resources, including:
