Fisheries’ resilience to climate change

The importance of building not only ecological but also social and social-ecological resilience to climate change is in ecosystem-based fisheries management theoretically well-recognised. However, fisheries management (in the studied regions) tends to focus on ecological resilience to climate change.

This study identifies fisheries management interventions, from published literature, for supporting social or ecological resilience of fisheries to environmental or social stressors. The study focuses on climate change adaptation and centres on fisheries in North America, Europe and the South Pacific.

By reviewing the adaptation interventions in 22 regions we found that, despite the theoretical emphasis of ecosystem-basted management approaches on social-ecological systems, the adaptation interventions of the studied fisheries focus mainly on ecological resilience to climate change, with general lack of planning for managing adaptation of stakeholders and maintaining social resilience. However, we also recognize that the conclusions drawn from this study may be more applicable to some regions than others.

Thus, including management of stakeholder resilience and considering social-ecological complexities and uncertainties in the design of adaptation pathways provides a currently little utilised way to build more resilient fisheries to the ecological and social changes associated with the climate change.

Read the article here

Woods P. et al. A review of adaptation options in fisheries management to support resilience and transition under socio-ecological changes. ICES Journal of Marine Science