As discussed in Step 1, climate change is altering the fundamental ecological conditions on which our understanding of fishery functioning and stock health are based. Given increased uncertainty, and potentially drastic changes to species’ ranges and productivity rates, it is critical that we begin to develop goals that are in harmony with what is going to be possible in a given fishery in the future. In other words, we must “benchmark forward,” rather than looking to the past for indicators of the efficacy of our management decisions.
But how can we balance this need to move our fisheries and fishing communities toward climate-informed goals, which may involve moving away from fishing the way we are familiar with it, and the need to bring our current fishing activities into alignment with current and future system boundaries, so that we can continue to meet current and near-term livelihood needs?
We suggest engaging in a participatory process to clearly articulate separate “Fishery Sustainability Goals” and “Climate Resilience Goals” for the fishery and community. Fishery Sustainability Goals might center around reduction of egregious impacts (like dynamite fishing), increasing fishing safety and/or profits, and/or the alignment of fishing pressure with the current regenerative capacity of the biophysical system (i.e., not catching more fish than are added to the population each year). Climate Resilience Goals may center more on things like the restoration of species diversity to build system resilience, the protection of “habitat corridors” to facilitate species range shifts, the sustainable management of emerging stocks, and/or capacity building and alternative livelihood development to help fishers adapt in response to climate-driven changes.
We list several example fishery objectives, organized loosely into Fishery Sustainability and Climate Resilience Goal categories, in Table 1.
Step 2, Table 1. Examples of common Fishery Sustainability and Climate Resilience Goals, along with relevant management objectives.
|
Goal Category |
Biological/ Ecological Objectives |
Economic Objectives |
Social/ Cultural Objectives |
|
Fishery Sustainability Goals |
Remove egregious system impacts (e.g., dynamite fishing, cyanide fishing) |
Decrease waste or discarding |
Decrease conflict |
|
Limit fishery truncation of age structure (i.e., stop catching juveniles and megaspawners) |
Decrease fishing costs |
Increase fishing safety |
|
|
Protect essential habitat |
Increase price per fish |
Increase or develop community involvement in management |
|
|
Protect spawning stock biomass |
Increase fishing profits |
Increase or maintain local fishing jobs |
|
|
Protect essential behaviors and functional diversity |
Increase production |
Protect cultural fishing traditions |
|
|
Decrease bycatch and/ or avoid serial depletion |
Increase product quality |
Improve equity of the distribution of benefits and risks from the fishery |
|
|
Climate Resilience Goals |
Improve ecosystem health, resilience, and biodiversity |
Increase fishing/ supply chain efficiency and flexibility |
Improve community livelihoods and wellbeing |
|
Facilitate species adaptive capacity by protecting habitat throughout temperature corridors |
Increase flexibility and adaptability of fishers |
Improve community resilience and transformational capacity |
|
|
Facilitate the sustainable harvest of emerging stocks |
Expand livelihood options |
Support vulnerable and marginalized groups through transition |
In order to achieve goals like these, I it will be necessary to identify the different steps required to move a fishery toward them. Actions aimed at expanding livelihood options in a community may be very different from those aimed at increasing product quality. It will thus be necessary to clearly articulate what can be done with current levels of capacity, and to explicitly incorporate plans to move toward harder to reach goals into the adaptive management process.
While it may be tempting to think of Climate Resilience Goals as “longer-term” targets that can be de-prioritized for now, this kind of thinking may be quite risky. It is often the case that building climate resilience requires taking certain enabling steps as soon as possible. For example, in order to sustainably harvest emerging stocks, it will be necessary to first create and implement a monitoring system that will be capable of detecting the presence of new species in the area and, ideally, of determining when they have become established enough to begin harvesting.