An Ecosystem Approach for Assessing Vulnerability of West Coast Fisheries to a Changing Climate

Climate change is likely to impact marine life in a number of ways, including the alteration of coastal habitats as a result of sea level rise, shifts in abundance and distribution of marine species, phenological changes and increased incidence of harmful algal blooms and other nuisance species. Cumulatively, these climate-related marine environmental changes have potentially serious consequences for West Coast fisheries that will add to existing challenges to their long-term sustainability.

Fisheries and the management systems that govern them will not be equally affected by climate change. Factors shaping vulnerability will vary among fisheries and relate to the exposure of a fishery to climate change, its sensitivity to those changes, and its ability to adjust to those changes or its adaptive capacity. NOAA, Sea Grant and other West Coast partners are exploring a new approach for evaluating the impacts of climate change on three Pacific fisheries: groundfish, whiting, and Dungeness crab. The approach uses a workshop format to combine the expert knowledge of scientists, fisheries managers, industry representatives, and others from Washington, Oregon, and California to assess how climate change could affect these fisheries.  Through this qualitative approach, we hope to better articulate fisheries management goals for addressing climate change, so that those goals may more directly affect developing ecosystem modeling efforts.