Introduction
Communicating seafood sustainability to non-specialist audiences remains difficult because the subject is complex and often fragmented across environmental, nutritional, socio-economic, biodiversity, and provenance-related dimensions. In practice, this complexity is often communicated either through technical language that excludes general audiences or through simplified claims that remove context and credibility. The Horizon Europe project VeriFish was developed to address this gap by creating a verifiable indicator framework for seafood and translating it into communication tools that could support informed understanding and responsible choices. The project combined work on indicators, scoring logic, communication guidelines, a web application, factsheets, media products, and outreach campaigns, with the aim of making sustainability-related information easier to understand and use across different audiences. The framework was built around a simplified Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response logic and included environmental, nutrition and health, socio-economic, and provenance dimensions. Eurofish also led the development of guidelines for how to visualise and communicate these indicators in ways that remain accurate while understandable to consumers and other value-chain actors.
A central premise of VeriFish was that communication should not be treated as a final dissemination layer added after technical work is complete. Instead, communication needed to be integrated into the design of outputs from the beginning, including format, wording, level of detail, and visual framing. This approach was embedded in Work Package 3, which aimed to transform VeriFish seafood and aquaculture indicators into accessible media products, build a community of practice around those products, and test their effectiveness through outreach campaigns and stakeholder engagement. Planned outputs included digital factsheets, flashcard-based educational games, puzzles, storytelling sessions, short videos, newsletters, articles, and a web app serving as the main interface for structured information. To support this work, VeriFish included collaborative workshops and user-oriented discussions involving seafood producers and consumer representatives. The project description envisaged at least three design and requirements workshops to ensure that products responded to real user needs rather than internal project assumptions. In practice, four workshops were organised, with around 25 participants per workshop. Across the project, around 30 videos were produced, one web app was created integrating more than 100 species, and factsheet-style outputs could be extracted from the app. Dissemination was reinforced through social media channels and through the final conference, which gathered around 50 participants in person and 35 online.
Results and Discussion
The VeriFish experience showed that communication products were most effective when they were visually clear, concise, and adapted to the way audiences actually engage with information. Among the products developed, the card games worked especially well because they were easy to understand, fast to use, and visually engaging. This is consistent with the original media-product design, which explicitly included flashcard and puzzle-style formats for children and citizens as a way to communicate sustainability, nutrition, and biodiversity-related information in a more approachable manner. The project web app served a different but equally important role: rather than competing for attention through simplification alone, it functioned as the main structured information hub, capable of holding more detailed content while still presenting it in a navigable and user-oriented format. This division between lightweight entry products and a deeper information source proved effective.
A second clear lesson concerned text density and framing. Stakeholder exchanges repeatedly showed that general audiences need attractive framing and visual support to stay engaged. High text density discouraged interaction and made information appear difficult, even when the content itself was relevant. This forced a discipline of precision: the more information that was included, the more concrete and economical the wording had to become. A third lesson concerned video communication. Short videos attracted attention, while longer formats lost it quickly; in the VeriFish experience, anything beyond roughly three minutes was already too long for broad audience engagement. Videos also performed better when they included a personal or human dimension, while generic explanatory videos were easier to ignore. These findings suggest that communicating fisheries and aquaculture science effectively requires more than simplification. It requires translation into formats that fit different attention spans, expectations, and use contexts. Producers can act as valuable sources of information, especially for Tier 2 data, but communication products aimed at citizens must be short, visual, and easy to interpret. More detailed evidence can then sit behind those products in apps, factsheets, or linked materials. VeriFish therefore suggests that effective science communication in aquaculture depends on three conditions: a transparent and verifiable evidence base, audience-sensitive design, and the discipline to prioritise clarity over volume.
Acknowledgment
VeriFish has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe programme under Grant Agreement No. 101156426. The project focused on stimulating sustainable seafood consumption through a verifiable indicator framework.
References
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