When You Come to a Fork in the Climate-Change Road – Take It: An Evaluation of the Fish Management and Policy Dilemma of Climate Change for Fisheries Agencies

While climate change is one of the most politically charged science issues of our time, the evidence for increasing global temperatures is clear.  The implications of these temperature changes on aquatic resources leave resource managers with significant challenges and dilemmas.  This paper will summarize some of the potential aquatic resource outcomes from increasing temperatures using information from other speakers in this session and provide a suite of policy options that resource managers need to consider for implementation at this time.  Some of the likely general climate outcomes are: that coldwater species habitat will contract and move to higher elevations or northwards; southern areas will become increasingly tropical in places and much drier in other places with water becoming an increasingly more valuable commodity; currently snowmelt driven systems will become rain driven systems; glacial driven systems will become snowmelt or rain driven systems; there will be an increase in severe storm frequency; and an increase in ocean elevations.  For a fisheries manager, this means that: coldwater species will contract in their ranges, warm and coolwater species will expand their ranges; habitat conditions will likely become more unstable and harder to predict and manage; invasions of non-native species will increase as will instability in energy flows in systems; increasing land conversion from forest to agriculture and urban landscapes; and the ability of new AIS from other global sources to colonize will increase as many are from warm climate areas creating more ecosystem disruption.  These are just some of the challenges facing fisheries managers.   The responses to these challenges create some serious dilemmas including: should fisheries managers play God or allow population extinctions to occur;  how to maintain water in watersheds in the face in increasing social demands for water;  how to keep fish in our waters in the face of increasing engineering solutions to rising water levels from increasing ocean elevations and severe storms; what fish species should be manage for and against along with for how long; and how do we keep systems connected and allow for species movements or do we move them ourselves as we did in the Johnny Fishseed days of the late 1800s.  We will illustrate these challenges and dilemmas along potential management options to start the policy discussion and planning for our collective fisheries future.