Sudden, extreme environmental events that harm both fish populations and the fishers that depend on them are becoming more frequent. Ideally, new policies will allow fishers more adaptability in response to such shocks without sacrificing sustainability.
Over the past 50 years, the management of fisheries in the United States has been a story of constraints on fishing activity that have evolved to address environmental, economic, and social challenges. Examples of such constraints include limits on the amount of a given species that fishers are allowed to catch, which can mitigate overfishing, and limits on the number of fishers working in a given area, which can improve economic efficiency by preventing a situation of too many fishers chasing too few fish. For the most part, these controls have effectively maintained the sustainability of fish stocks and kept fishers fishing.
That the same policies will continue to deliver similar success is not guaranteed. While oceans are dynamic environments, the basis of fisheries management in the United States is the assumption that conditions in the ocean eventually will revert to a (stable) mean as long as good management practices are in place. The impacts of climate change and emerging unpredictability threaten to upend this fundamental assumption.
Some climate impacts are likely to occur over a longer time horizon, such as the increasingly well-documented trend of fish stocks shifting northward in response to warming waters. However, the uptick in environmental events that cause immediate, drastic disruptions to fisheries may be more distressing.
For example, marine heat waves—such as the heat wave off the West Coast that lasted from 2014 to 2016, nicknamed “the Blob”—led to high mortality among marine species, changes in the location of species in the California Current (an underwater current along the west coast of North America), and low productivity of fisheries on the West Coast. Such sudden impacts cause economic and social harm to fishing operations and the surrounding communities that rely on the fishing industry, and federal declarations of “fisheries disasters” have increased in both frequency and cost, totaling well over $2 billion to date.
Credit: twabian / Shutterstock
States and the federal government are considering how to revise their management of fisheries to better cope with extreme events; relying on federal assistance from disaster declarations is not in anyone’s best interest. Given the difficulty in predicting when and where these climate-induced shocks might occur, many are calling for reforms that increase the capacity of fishers to adapt to shocks without sacrificing the sustainability of fishing practices in a given ecosystem.
Adaptive Fisheries
In a new working paper, we contribute to this conversation by highlighting the degrees of freedom that are available to fishery managers, along with the potential policy options that already are employed by managers around the world and that increase the capacity of fishers to adapt to climate change. Our review of this suite of options, and the specific challenges they were designed to address, reveals several key points that can inform managers as they consider different approaches to address the new challenges that climate change introduces.
Adaptive capacity in fisheries management broadly falls into two categories: First, the options within rules that govern a particular fishery (known as the “internal margins” of adaptive responses), such as the timing of a fishing season, the amount of catch allowed, or the type of fishing gear used. Second, the options that apply across fisheries (known as the “external margins”), such as allowing fishers to catch species other than those covered by existing permits.
Most studies and policy discussions to date focus on changes to external margins; in particular, temporarily allowing fishers access to fisheries for which they lack permits (e.g., to mitigate unexpected closures of primary fisheries) or diversifying a fisher’s portfolio of permits (to mitigate the risk from any one fishery). But this focus may limit a manager’s view of the full suite of options for introducing adaptive capacity.
We’ve noted various other tools and approaches for adaptive capacity that are being applied in fisheries around the world. Fishery managers have overcome specific challenges under various regulatory regimes by introducing flexibility along multiple dimensions, including time and area. Some fisheries have adapted by changing the start dates of fishing seasons or carrying over unspent fishing quota from one year to the next. Other fisheries have adapted geographically; for example, by changing access to closed areas under specific conditions or trading catch allocations across jurisdictions. Others have looked to rules for fishing gear, such as allowing fishers to select gear within some criteria. Still others have modified access to resources, such as temporarily leasing permits to other fisheries or allowing fishers to catch different species.
If the history of fisheries management has been one of introducing limits, policymakers should ensure that purposefully relaxing those regulations will not undo the gains in conservation that have been accomplished to date.
Notably, all these adaptive tools have been designed for specific contexts, which implies that the success of these tools depends on the specific context. Thus, a one-size-fits-all approach, which has dominated policy discussions to date, is unlikely to work.
Although managers have multiple options to increase the capacity of fishers to adapt to climate change, any efforts also must harness the on-the-water knowledge of fishers and empower fishers by creating rules and spaces that enable innovative responses. Examples of innovations include pooling risk among fishers, establishing cooperatives for fishing marketing and production, and creating public and private groups that collectively purchase and lease fishing permits.
Adapting without Regressing
Upending fisheries management is not a riskless endeavor. Certain measures that introduce adaptive capacity also carry risks to environmental sustainability.
For example, adaptive measures that inadvertently allow long-term overfishing could undermine any benefit that the measure was meant to provide—and erode the long-term value of a fishery. Of course, inaction in the face of increasingly frequent climate shocks equally would threaten the value of a fishery. And even if environmental sustainability is assured, many adaptive measures, such as increasing access to more fish species and fishing areas, could change the value of a permit for a given fishery or otherwise adversely affect important cultural aspects of fisheries. Understanding the potential effects of any adaptive strategy on local political economies is paramount for fishery managers.
If the history of fisheries management has been one of introducing limits, policymakers should ensure that purposefully relaxing those regulations will not undo the gains in conservation that have been accomplished to date. At the same time, many fisheries are constrained by multiple overlapping rules that were added piecemeal with little foresight. Now may be the time to consider an optimal mix of relaxing some of these constraints while keeping others.
