The world’s biggest seafood companies might seem to have a vested interest in healthy marine ecosystems and plentiful fish stocks. Many claim a commitment to biodiversity in their public messaging. Yet a new report shows they mostly lobby against environmental protections. InfluenceMap, a U.K.-based NGO, released the report on April 10. It assesses the biodiversity-related lobbying efforts of a list of the 30 most influential seafood companies in the world and 12 of the main industry associations they’re members of.

Most of the companies are based in North America, Europe and Japan. All but one of the 30 companies engages in lobbying that’s either partially or fully “misaligned” with international biodiversity goals agreed to in a 2022 U.N. treaty, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the report says. Likewise, all but two of the industry associations predominantly lobby governments to obstruct progress toward those goals, it says. “Overwhelmingly the engagement that we found was pretty negative and targeting a number of different policy types that have an impact on marine biodiversity,” Rebecca Vaughan, director of methodologies and program development at InfluenceMap and co-author of the report, told Mongabay. “These companies are also members of industry associations that have been overwhelmingly lobbying to weaken and delay policy,” she added. Industry associations told Mongabay that they support science-based policy and that the report is flawed. A table shows InfluenceMap’s ratings of industry associations’ marine biodiversity-related lobbying efforts. Image courtesy of InfluenceMap. The report is one of the first assessments of the global seafood…This article was originally published on Mongabay