Adaptation of Fishing Communities to Climate-Driven Shifts in Target Species

Climate change is causing shifts in marine species’ distributions, disrupting fishers and fishing communities and threatening food security. These changes affect all fishing activities, from small-scale to industrial fishing, and have implications for livelihoods, economies, and society along the entire seafood supply chain. Understanding fisheries as social-ecological systems (SESs) that include dynamic responses and feedbacks for the targeted stocks, the fishers, and the fishing industry provides an essential standpoint for thinking about fisheries’ adaptation to climate change. This Perspective briefly summarizes the ecological and socioeconomic impacts of target species’ distribution shifts. A resilience perspective is proposed, where fishery SESs can respond to climate changes by maintaining, coping, adapting, and/or transforming the system. Associated actions and risks to these pathways at the individual and collective levels are identified. A set of specific policy options are discussed with the potential to address the ecological and socioeconomic impacts linked to species range shifts under climate change. Solutions include changing management practices to be more adaptive, flexible, and participatory; creating new markets and adding value to existing market products and their value chains; or conservation measures such as fishing closures, marine protected areas, and new international agreements.