Climate change is causing shifts in marine species' distributions, disrupting fishers and fishing communities and threatening food security. These changes affect all fishing activities, from small-scale to industrial fishing, and have implications for livelihoods, economies, and society along the entire seafood supply chain. Understanding fisheries as social-ecological systems (SESs) that include dynamic responses and feedbacks for the targeted stocks, the fishers, and the fishing industry provides an essential standpoint for thinking about fisheries' adaptation to climate change. In this Perspective, we briefly summarize the ecological and socioeconomic impacts of target species' distribution shifts. We propose using a resilience perspective where fishery SESs can respond to climate changes by maintaining, coping, adapting, and/or transforming the system. In this context, we identify what specific actions by individuals, groups, and institutions allow the fishery system to respond in these ways and discuss policy solutions to allow for adaptation and transformation to shifting species distributions. ll

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Despite the importance of livelihood diversification as a transformation strategy in small-scale fisheries facing climate change, empirical evidence on this complex phenomenon is scarce. This work aims to shed light on factors that help to explain the transformative behavior of small-scale fishers when faced with climate change impacts. Using primary survey data from 404 small-scale fishers across 9 communities in Galicia, NW Spain, we examined how different aspects of fishers’ adaptive capacities relate to their stated decisions to engage in livelihood diversification when faced with hypothetical climate change scenarios. The results of our multinomial multilevel mixed-effect logit model show that flexibility (current income diversification level and diversity of target fishery resources) has a strong, positive relationship with livelihood diversification responses. In contrast, learning, social organization, and competing concerns played a complex role. Specifically, we found that social-ecological system knowledge, communication with different fishing groups (bridging communication), trust in institutional actors, and gender (female) were positively related to livelihood diversification when faced with climate impacts. Fishing experience, communication within fishing groups (bonding communication), and trust in other fishing groups (bridging trust) were negatively related to diversification. Our results provide new empirical evidence on the factors associated with fisher’s decisions to engage in livelihood diversification when faced with climate impacts on fishery resources, lending critical insight for climate adaptation programs and policies.

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Climate change is expected to have increasing impacts on marine ecosystems which will threaten the livelihoods and wellbeing of millions of people. Drawing on social-ecological network and sociodemographic data collected via face-to-face interviews with 404 small-scale commercial fishers from 9 Galician communities (Spain), we empirically examine the adaptation pathways that fishers follow when they face hypothetical impacts on their fishery resources and test the role of five social-ecological network structures on fisher’s stated intended responses to such scenarios. Our results show that fishers generally intend to follow a ‘remain—adapt—transform—exit (the fishery)’ pathway when faced with increasing climate impacts. Next, we demonstrate that trust-based bonding ties and ties to informal leaders are associated with a ‘business-as-usual’ strategy. In contrast, communicative bonding ties are associated with adaptive responses, while communicative bridging ties are associated with transformative and exit strategies. Our findings provide key empirical insight that broaden our understanding of the intricate relationship between social networks and adaptive behaviour relevant to social-ecological systems worldwide.