Opportunities for climate-risk reduction through effective fisheries management

Cheung, William W. L.; Jones, Miranda C.; Reygondeau, Gabriel; Frölicher, Thomas (2018). Opportunities for climate-risk reduction through effective fisheries management. Global Change Biology, 24(11), pp. 5149-5163. Blackwell Science 10.1111/gcb.14390

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Risk of impact of marine fishes to fishing and climate change (including ocean acidi-
fication) depend on the species’ ecological and biological characteristics, as well as
their exposure to over‐exploitation and climate hazards. These human‐induced haz-
ards should be considered concurrently in conservation risk assessment. In this
study, we aim to examine the combined contributions of climate change and fishing
to the risk of impacts of exploited fishes, and the scope for climate‐risk reduction
from fisheries management. We combine fuzzy logic expert system with species dis-
tribution modeling to assess the extinction risks of climate and fishing impacts of
825 exploited marine fish species across the global ocean. We compare our calcu-
lated risk index with extinction risk of marine species assessed by the International
Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Our results show that 60% (499 species)
of the assessed species are projected to experience very high risk from both over-
fishing and climate change under a “business‐as‐usual” scenario (RCP 8.5 with cur-
rent status of fisheries) by 2050. The risk index is significantly and positively related
to level of IUCN extinction risk (ordinal logistic regression, p<0.0001). Further-
more, the regression model predicts species with very high risk index would have at
least one in five (>20%) chance of having high extinction risk in the next few dec-
ades (equivalent to the IUCN categories of vulnerable, endangered or critically
endangered). Areas with more at‐risk species to climate change are in tropical and
subtropical oceans, while those that are at risk to fishing are distributed more
broadly, with higher concentration of at‐risk species in North Atlantic and South
Pacific Ocean. The number of species with high extinction risk would decrease by
63% under the sustainable fisheries‐low emission scenario relative to the “business
‐as‐usual” scenario. This study highlights the substantial opportunities for climate
‐risk reduction through effective fisheries management.

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