Fisheries Climate Survey Report FINAL - Flipbook - Page 14
IMPACTS TO MANAGEMENT
The majority of respondents indicate experiencing stress from changes in fisheries and the environment,
suggesting climate change may be exacerbating harvesters’ concerns for the viability of their fishing
businesses. It is therefore not surprising that participants that do recognize the threat of climate change had a
higher perceived vulnerability than those who do not recognize the threat. The link between higher perceived
vulnerability and recognition of the threats from climate change has been shown previously with grape growers
in Australia who were convinced about climate change having higher perceptions of risk (Fleming et al., 2015).
Within the American public, those who are concerned about climate change are the most motivated to act
on climate change (Leiserowitz et al., 2021) and those who think about climate change more frequently think
it is a greater risk than those who think about it less frequently (Ballew et al., 2019). Considering that climate
change is known to exacerbate existing threats, the findings from this survey can be informative on how to
incorporate perceptions of the impacts of climate change and resulting vulnerabilities into fisheries policy and
management.
This survey illuminates the necessity of addressing climate change alongside other concerns that harvesters
perceive as more immediate and pressing such as fisheries regulations, markets, and access to working
waterfront. The issues perceived to be a more immediate threat to harvesters lie in one of the four triggers
that have been identified in psychology to elicit a call to action: personal, abrupt, immoral, and now (Marshall,
2014). Climate change has the perception of being a slow moving and distant threat which does not trigger
any of these aspects used to identify problems worthy of timely action (Marshall, 2014). However, climate
change is a threat multiplier, exacerbating already existing challenges (Salas and Solomon, 2019; Salas and
Hayhoe, 2021). The challenges associated with the concerns identified by harvesters in this survey (fisheries
regulations, COVID markets, and access to working waterfront), may be further amplified by a changing
environment (Johnson and Welch, 2010; Watkiss et al., 2019; Bassett et al., 2021), and therefore must be
considered in climate adaptation planning.
While humans only have limited emotional capacity to respond to potential threats, fisheries are currently
being impacted by climate change and action needs to be taken to address the impacts of climate change on
fisheries and harvesters. Many management or policy actions that address climate impacts may also help with
the other concerns raised by fishers in this survey. Integrating climate change into every aspect of fisheries
management and articulating how climate measures promote overall industry resilience may help in the
acceptance of such policies for those less concerned about climate change. Additionally, fisheries managers
and policy-makers should prioritize focusing on the most harmful impacts using a regionally specific approach.
The impacts of climate change on fisheries is socially and ecologically heterogenous and as a result regionally
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