Improving the Reliability of Fishery Predictions Under Climate Change

Abstract

The increasing number of publications assessing impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems and fisheries attests to rising scientific and public interest. A selection of recent papers, dealing more with biological than social and economic aspects, is reviewed here, with particular attention to the reliability of projections of climate impacts on future fishery yields. The 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report expresses high confidence in projections that mid-and high-latitude fish catch potential will increase by 2050 and medium confidence that low-latitude catch potential will decline. These levels of confidence seem unwarranted, since many processes are either absent from or poorly represented in the models used, data are sparse and, unlike terrestrial crop projections, there are no controlled experiments. This review discusses methodological issues that affect our understanding of climate impacts, such as how to improve coupled models from physics to fish and how to strengthen confidence in analysis of time series.

Managing consequences of climate‐driven species redistribution requires integration of ecology, conservation and social science

“…However, a single approach (Cheung et al, ) has been dominant in representing species redistributions. While this model has been repeatedly updated (Cheung & Reygondeau, ; Cheung et al, ), considerable structural uncertainty remains in our ability to predict change in fishery production, as production depends critically on uncertain future fishery‐management arrangements (Brander, ). The extent to which structural uncertainty afflicts global production estimates needs to be evaluated with alternative modelling approaches.…”

Changes in Patterns of Seasonality Shown by Migratory Fish under Global Warming: Evidence from Catch Data of Taiwan’s Coastal Fisheries

“…A selection of recent papers, addressing biological rather than social and economic aspects, is reviewed here, with particular attention given to the climate impact on future fishery yields [1,2]. Climate change has significant effects on marine organisms.…”

Conservation physiology of marine fishes: state of the art and prospects for policy

“…There is a need for reliable knowledge about how fishes function, in order to ensure that ‘universal’ traits of energetics are valid and are correctly represented in model parameterizations. This is essential to improve confidence in predictions about effects of climate change ( Brander, 2015 ; Peck et al ., 2016 ). The debate surrounding the Fry and OCLTT paradigms’ performance curves has already been mentioned, and the physiological principles underlying some other influential model projections ( Pauly, 1981 ; Cheung et al ., 2011, 2012 ) have also been questioned ( Brander, 2015 ).…”

“…The ability to investigate how other processes, such as hypoxia, ocean acidification and trophic disruption, will interact with warming is now recognized as a research priority ( Gunderson et al ., 2016 ) and is a major strength of the models that incorporate aerobic scope or DEB. This has been highlighted as an area of great uncertainty in other physiology-based models ( Brander, 2015 ). Once again, however, application of physiology in models requires more information on many more marine fish species.…”