Governing the Global Commons in the Face of Climate Change

Management of wild marine resources within national EEZs has been far from successful in many cases. Sustainable use of common resources in the high seas is further complicated by geographical scale and international complexity. Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) have a responsibility to secure sustainability of high seas resources in the present and in a future likely to be substantially influenced by climate change. This paper investigates the governance frameworks for these global commons and attempts to investigate the capacity and commitment of participating countries in sustaining high seas social-ecological systems. The aim of the paper is to investigate potential climate scenarios in the respective geographical areas, to study the extent partners of RFMOs have committed to international frameworks for sustainability and to what extent characteristics of RFMOs are influencing their performance. Our hypothesis is that RFMOs consisting of “committed” countries with a high governance capacity are better equipped to adapt to a changing climate. For governance, we investigated the participation of states in RFMOs and their commitments to international agreements relevant for sustainable management of marine resources. We used World Bank Governance index as a proxy for the governance capacity of states and related these variables to a recent evaluation of the performance of RFMOs. Further we undertook social network analysis to analyze the relationships between countries with respect to high seas governance and their relative influence using measures of network centrality. For climate change, we analyzed trends of projected climate change from 21 climate models, using projections for three different scenarios (optimistic: B1, middle: A1B, and pessimistic: A2) and 100 years (usually 2001 to 2100) with monthly time steps. The climate scenarios indicate substantial change in many of the high seas areas studied but RFMOs made up of ”committed” countries may not have jurisdiction over areas of the high seas that are predicted to be most strongly impacted by climate change under the different scenarios examined. Our study raises the question of governability of marine social-ecological systems under climate change.