Ecosystem Complexity Mitigates Climate Risk to Fishing Communities

Fish population dynamics are increasingly recognized as sensitive to changing climatic conditions, though the mechanisms that produce this sensitivity remain largely unknown in nearly all ecosystems. Changing climate has the potential to seriously disrupt aquatic food webs and fishing communities, thereby motivating enormous research efforts to improve understanding and forecasts of climate impacts on aquatic ecosystems. Studies of Pacific salmon in Alaska over the last century, and insights from paleolimnology, suggest that understanding and forecasts of climate impacts will always be hugely uncertain, and context dependent. Thus, we argue that ecologists should be dedicating more effort in exploring ways to mitigate the risks of climate impacts rather than relying heavily on developing a rich understanding of climate impacts to ecosystems. Management systems that are flexible enough to enable fishermen to integrate across the diversity of responses to climate change seen both among the populations that comprise exploited stocks, and among the species that comprise exploited ecosystems, are likely to provide for sustainability in an uncertain future.