Towards climate resiliency in fisheries management

Abstract

It is increasingly evident that climate change is having significant impacts on marine ecosystems and dependent fisheries. Yet, translating climate science into management actions and policies is an ongoing challenge. In particular, four aspects have confounded implementation of climate-resilient management: (i) regional management tools may not be well-suited for managing the same systems under climate change, (ii) individual management policies and climate research studies are often implicitly focussed on spatio-temporal scales that are rarely aligned, (iii) management approaches seldom integrate across spatio-temporal scales and are, therefore, maladapted to unidirectional change and extreme events, and (iv) challenges to modelling socio-economic implications of climate change impede projections of cumulative costs to society, disguise adaptive limits, and ultimately impact climate risk and management trade-off assessments. We suggest that addressing environmental change favours adaptive and dynamic management approaches, while addressing shifting socio-economic and political conditions favours fixed long-term measures; considering both jointly requires a combination of dynamic-adaptive-fixed approaches. We outline a framework to integrate climate-responsive tools into a unified climate-resilient management approach using nested dynamic-adaptive-fixed management portfolios that improve management effectiveness and efficiency. This approach may help reduce future conflict between marine resource extractive and conservation goals through more explicit characterization of management trade-offs and identification of social and ecological tipping points.

Realistic fisheries management reforms could mitigate the impacts of climate change in most countries

“…Fortunately, a growing body of literature provides guidance on accounting for shifting distributions and productivity in fisheries assessment and management [14,17,45,46] and for fostering socioeconomic resilience to climate change [47][48][49] in diverse fisheries systems. In the remainder of this paper, we provide a brief overview of this literature and recommend general principles as well as specific strategies for achieving the benefits of climate-adaptive management reforms.…”

“…Adapting to climate change will require dynamic, flexible, and forward-looking management. This can be achieved by aligning management policies with the spatio-temporal scales of climate change, ecosystem change, and socioeconomic responses [14]. In higher capacity systems, this could involve four broad strategies.…”

“…The response of fishers and managers to these changes could either exacerbate or mitigate the impacts of climate change on human society and must be considered in forecasts of climate impacts on marine fisheries [13,14]. For example, a failure to reduce harvest rates in response to decreasing productivity could increase the risk of overfishing [15], which could subsequently reduce the resilience of stocks to climate change [4] and result in reduced long-term yields [16].…”

Realistic fisheries management reforms could mitigate the impacts of climate change in most countries

“…Fortunately, a growing body of literature provides guidance on accounting for shifting distributions and productivity in fisheries assessment and management [14,17,36,37] and for fostering socioeconomic resilience to climate change [38–40] in diverse fisheries systems. In the remainder of this paper, we provide a brief overview of this literature and recommend general principles as well as specific strategies for achieving the benefits of climate-adaptive management reforms.…”

“…The impact of climate change on fishing communities can be reduced through measures that increase socioeconomic resilience and adaptive capacity to environmental variability and changing fisheries [40,64,65]. Across low to high capacity systems, these measures include (1) policies that facilitate flexibility, such as diversification of access to fisheries and alternative livelihoods, (2) policies that provide better assets, such as the enhancement of fisheries technology and capacity, (3) policies that provide better organization in the system, including multi-level governance, community-based management, and other governance structures [14, 39], and (4) policies that promote agency and learning [40]. For example, policies that promote access to multiple fisheries provide fishers with a portfolio of fishing opportunities that can buffer against variability [66, 67] while policies that promote diverse livelihoods reduce reliance on fisheries [68, 69].…”