Assessments of the combined ecological impacts of ocean acidification and warming (OAW) and their social and economic consequences can help develop adaptive and responsive management strategies in the most sensitive regions. Here, available observational and experimental data, theoretical, and modelling approaches are combined to project and quantify potential effects of OAW on the future fisheries catches and resulting revenues and employment in the UK under different CO 2 emission scenarios. Across all scenarios, based on the limited available experimental results considered, the bivalve species investigated were more affected by OAW than the fish species considered, compared with ocean warming alone. Projected standing stock biomasses decrease between 10 and 60%. These impacts translate into an overall fish and shellfish catch decrease of between 10 and 30% by 2020 across all areas except for the Scotland >10 m fleet. This latter fleet shows average positive impacts until 2050, declining afterwards. The main driver of the projected decreases is temperature rise (0.5-3.3°C), which exacerbate the impact of decreases in primary production (10-30%) in UK fishing waters. The inclusion of the effect of ocean acidification on the carbon uptake of primary producers had very little impact on the projections of potential fish and shellfish catches (<1%). The <10 m fleet is likely to be the most impacted by-catch decreases in the short term (2020-50), whereas the effects will be experienced more strongly by the >10 m fleet by the end of the century in all countries. Overall, losses in revenue are estimated to range between 1 and 21% in the short term (2020-50) with England and Scotland being the most negatively impacted in absolute terms, and Wales and North Ireland in relative terms. Losses in total employment (fisheries and associated industries) may reach approximately 3-20% during 2020-50 with the >10 m fleet and associated industries bearing the majority of the losses.

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It has proven extremely challenging for researchers to predict with confidence how human societies might develop in the future, yet managers and industries need to make projections in order to test adaptation and mitigation strategies designed to build resilience to long-term shocks. This paper introduces exploratory scenarios with a particular focus on European aquaculture and fisheries and describes how these scenarios were designed. Short-, medium- and long-term developments in socio-political drivers may be just as important in determining profits, revenues and prospects in the aquaculture and fisheries industries as physical drivers such as long-term climate change. Four socio-political-economic futures were developed, based partly on the IPCC SRES (Special Report on Emissions Scenarios) framework and partly on the newer system of Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs). ‘Off the shelf’ narrative material as well as quantitative outputs were ‘borrowed’ from earlier frameworks but supplemented with material generated through in-depth stakeholder workshops involving industry and policy makers. Workshop participants were tasked to outline how they thought their sector might look under the four future worlds and, in particular, to make use of the PESTEL conceptual framework (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal) as an aide memoire to help define the scope of each scenario. This work was carried out under the auspices of the EU Horizon 2020 project CERES (Climate change and European aquatic RESources), and for each ‘CERES scenario’ (World Markets, National Enterprise, Global Sustainability and Local Stewardship), additional quantitative outputs were generated, including projections of future fuel and fish prices, using the MAGNET (Modular Applied GeNeral Equilibrium Tool) modeling framework. In developing and applying the CERES scenarios, we have demonstrated that the basic architecture is sufficiently flexible to be used at a wide diversity of scales. We urge the climate science community to adopt a similar scenarios framework, based around SSPs, to facilitate global cross-comparison of fisheries and aquaculture model outputs more broadly and to harmonize communication regarding potential future bioeconomic impacts of climate change.