Abstract
It has proven extremely challenging for researchers to predict with confidence how human societies might develop in the future, yet managers and industries need to make projections in order to test adaptation and mitigation strategies designed to build resilience to long-term shocks. This paper introduces exploratory scenarios with a particular focus on European aquaculture and fisheries and describes how these scenarios were designed. Short-, medium- and long-term developments in socio-political drivers may be just as important in determining profits, revenues and prospects in the aquaculture and fisheries industries as physical drivers such as long-term climate change. Four socio-political-economic futures were developed, based partly on the IPCC SRES (Special Report on Emissions Scenarios) framework and partly on the newer system of Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs). ‘Off the shelf’ narrative material as well as quantitative outputs were ‘borrowed’ from earlier frameworks but supplemented with material generated through in-depth stakeholder workshops involving industry and policy makers. Workshop participants were tasked to outline how they thought their sector might look under the four future worlds and, in particular, to make use of the PESTEL conceptual framework (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal) as an aide memoire to help define the scope of each scenario. This work was carried out under the auspices of the EU Horizon 2020 project CERES (Climate change and European aquatic RESources), and for each ‘CERES scenario’ (World Markets, National Enterprise, Global Sustainability and Local Stewardship), additional quantitative outputs were generated, including projections of future fuel and fish prices, using the MAGNET (Modular Applied GeNeral Equilibrium Tool) modeling framework. In developing and applying the CERES scenarios, we have demonstrated that the basic architecture is sufficiently flexible to be used at a wide diversity of scales. We urge the climate science community to adopt a similar scenarios framework, based around SSPs, to facilitate global cross-comparison of fisheries and aquaculture model outputs more broadly and to harmonize communication regarding potential future bioeconomic impacts of climate change.
Highlights
Climate change is anticipated to have long-term and widespread consequences for fisheries and aquaculture in Europe (Peck and Pinnegar, 2018; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2019)
The CERES scenarios can be viewed as being structured, comprising two outward-looking internationalist scenarios (WM and Global Sustainability (GS)) and two more entrenched, inward-facing scenarios (NE and Local Stewardship (LS)). They can be viewed in terms of the implied level of state/government intervention, which is low under the World Markets (WM) scenario, but high under National Enterprise (NE) and somewhat intermediate in the LS and GS scenarios
The application of socioeconomic scenarios in the fisheries and aquaculture sector is in its infancy
Summary
Climate change is anticipated to have long-term and widespread consequences for fisheries and aquaculture in Europe (Peck and Pinnegar, 2018; IPCC, 2019). Scenarios can be fully quantitative, such as those used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or largely qualitative, i.e., they can exist only as a set of narrative storylines. Several typologies have been developed to describe different types of scenario (see Börjesson et al, 2006) They can be: (1) Predictive – i.e., describe what is expected to happen under certain pre-defined conditions; (2) Explorative – i.e., used to say what the logical outcome might be if the World develops in a particular coherent direction, or (3) Normative – i.e., outline the many possible ways that a desired outcome or destination could be reached. In the present study we have focused our attention on defining a set of four explorative scenarios; distinct visions of what the fisheries and aquaculture sector in Europe might look like, were the socio-political outlook of the continent to develop in each of four directions. In the present case it was decided to make use of both quantitative outputs and the underlying qualitative narrative from the SRES (Special Report on Emissions Scenarios) storylines developed by the IPCC in 2000 (Nakicenovicet al., 2000) as well as the newer Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) framework developed from 2010 onward (see O’Neill et al, 2014; van Vuuren et al, 2014), that will be a major feature of the IPCC 6th Assessment Report (AR6) in 2021
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