Economic Impacts of Global Warming: The Case of the Barents Sea Fisheries

Abstract

ABSTRACT. . Regional analyses of possible physical and biological effects of global warming in the Barents Sea area have been carried out recently. Based on such studies possible economic impacts of global warming on the Barents Sea fisheries have been quantified, assuming different types of management regimes. The EconSimp2000 model, consisting of the ecosystem model AggMult and the fleet model EconMult have been parameterized based on fleet and catch records from the Norwegian Barents Sea fisheries. The model has been used to study biological and economic impacts of different environmental scenarios representing possible consequences of global warming. The current environmental situation, including normal seasonal and other variations, has been used as a reference scenario. Several biological and economic indicators have been defined in order to evaluate the simulation results of different environmental scenarios and different types of management regimes. The findings support earlier studies where biological and economic impacts of changes in management regime is found to be more pronounced than impacts caused by effects of global warming.

Fisheries Management and Global Warming

“…The finding is that management constraints may have a greater economic and biological impact than the effect of climate change in a highly fluctuating system as the Barents Sea ecosystem. This study confirms the findings of other studies with less model integration between natural and social systems, but wider ranges of variations Heen, 2002 andEide, 2007). Figure 1 (from Eide, 2007) illustrates the different impacts in terms of cod population biomass (the Northeast Atlantic cod stock) and resource rent obtained from the cod fishery.…”

“…This study confirms the findings of other studies with less model integration between natural and social systems, but wider ranges of variations Heen, 2002 andEide, 2007). Figure 1 (from Eide, 2007) illustrates the different impacts in terms of cod population biomass (the Northeast Atlantic cod stock) and resource rent obtained from the cod fishery. Simulation results from Eide (2007) based on three climate scenarios for the Barents Sea ecosystem (colder, current and warmer) and six approaches to fisheries management, of which one being no management (open access).…”

“…Figure 1 (from Eide, 2007) illustrates the different impacts in terms of cod population biomass (the Northeast Atlantic cod stock) and resource rent obtained from the cod fishery. Simulation results from Eide (2007) based on three climate scenarios for the Barents Sea ecosystem (colder, current and warmer) and six approaches to fisheries management, of which one being no management (open access). Of the six remaining management regimes two represent previous and current implementations of precautionary approach to fisheries management (PA, two include fixed annual quota values (TACs) and the last fixed fleet size (limited entry).…”

“…The two panels to the left show simulations results for total cod population biomasses in million tonnes over a simulation period of 30 years (top panel) and corresponding resource rent in billion NOK. Further information could be obtained in Eide (2007).…”

Economic effects of global warming under stock growth uncertainty: the European sardine fishery

“…Moreover, global warming of the oceans is expected to alter the environmental conditions that determine the growth of the fishery resource ( In particular, the economic consequences of climate change on fisheries might manifest themselves through changes in the price and value of catches, fishing costs, fishers' incomes, and earnings to fishing companies (Arnason 2007;Bosello et al 2007). There are a number of research efforts currently underway to estimate the economic losses that might occur due to climate change (Eide 2007;Medel 2011; Sumaila et al 2011), and the economic costs of adapting fisheries to climate change (Tseng and Chen 2008). Most climate-change of studies is based on the models and scenarios on economic growth (Eboli et al 2010), or concentrated on simulating the potential losses (Sumaila et al 2011) or cost to fisheries due to climate change (Kavuncu 2007;Cinner et al 2011).…”