Future Seas III: Ensuring resilience and adaptive capacity of California Current System fisheries under climate-driven ecosystem shifts

Introduction to the problem: Climate change is driving shifts in the spatial distribution and productivity of living marine resources. As species shift, fishing ground access and fishing quota allocation across communities, states, or countries can become increasingly challenging. This can threaten fisheries sustainability, and impact individual and community well-being. Fishery managers thus need access to management frameworks that can promote adaptability of fishing communities, and are robust to climate shocks.

Rationale and statement of work: Climate change impacts to the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME) will likely include changes in oceanographic conditions, shifts in species distributions, novel trophic interactions, and changes to fishing grounds, with flow-on impacts to fishing communities. The Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) is advancing several initiatives to increase consideration of climate impacts on harvest-setting procedures, and fishing communities. In this proposal, we aim to link science to PFMC needs within the context of Fishery Management Plans for Coastal Pelagic Species (CPS), Highly Migratory Species (HMS), and groundfish. Our proposal builds on the “physics-to-fisheries” science flow of two previous projects (Future Seas I and II). Our overarching goal is to quantify ecological scenarios to enable climate-ready decision making for fisheries management. We seek to:

• Quantify the climate vulnerability of West Coast fishing communities, and identify potential adaptive strategies;
• Identify management strategies at the single-species or ecosystem level allowing robust management of Fishery Management Plan species into the future; and
• Describe how climate change, including transboundary shifts and international cooperation/non-cooperation, will affect human communities and key fishery portfolios. Key elements of the workplan are to 1) develop downscaled biogeochemical projections for the broader CCLME, 2) assess species shifts from statistical models linked to the Atlantis ecosystem model, 3) quantify fishing community vulnerability, and 4) develop climate-informed Management Strategy Evaluation modules, including a game-theory submodel.