Fisheries Climate Survey Report FINAL - Flipbook - Page 3
INTRODUCTION
Climate change is impacting marine ecosystems by affecting species abundance and distribution (Poloczanska
et al., 2016; Morley et al., 2018). The upper ocean waters of the Northwest Atlantic Shelf are warming two to
three times faster than the global average (Saba et al., 2016). On the East Coast of the United States species
are either shifting poleward or into deeper waters because of these changing ocean conditions (Pinsky and
Fogarty, 2012; Hare et al., 2016; Kleisner et al., 2017). Shifts in species distribution and other impacts of climate
change on fisheries create challenges for fisheries managers (Pinksy and Mantua, 2014), and individual fishing
operations (Pinsky and Fogarty, 2012), while also impacting the wellbeing of harvester’s dependent on these
resources (Breslow et al., 2016; Barange et al., 2018). As climate change continues to impact commercially
important species, harvesters will need to adapt to changing conditions (Coulthard, 2009; McIlgorm et al.,
2010; Pinsky and Mantua, 2014) and fisheries managers will need to understand what harvesters require for
long-term preparedness, a necessary step in addressing the impacts of climate change (Marshall, 2014).
The Nature Conservancy in Maine surveyed New England commercial harvesters to understand perceptions
of the impacts of climate change and other stressors experienced by the fishing industry. The vulnerability
index we developed assesses individual’s perceived risk to the impacts of climate change and their capacity to
respond or adapt (Cullen and Anderson, 2017; Nelson, 2021). Risk to climate change consists of the exposure
of an individual to environmental changes (Adger, 2006) and the sensitivity of an individual’s wellbeing to
these changes (Breslow et al., 2017). The set of circumstances or choices an individual can make to cope,
respond, and modify that risk is their adaptive capacity (Grothmann and Patt, 2005). Vulnerability is defined
here as risk moderated by adaptive capacity (Cinner and Barnes, 2019).
Because the impacts of climate change and the resulting climate vulnerability are typically unevenly distributed,
information regarding fishery-specific climate vulnerability is essential to management and planning initiatives
aimed at increasing the resilience of harvesters and fisheries dependent communities as they face the adverse
impacts of climate change. Understanding how harvesters view their own risk to a changing climate and the
impacts it is having on their target species provides insight into what harvesters view as important in the
management arena.
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