Improving the Reliability of Fishery Predictions Under Climate Change

Abstract

The increasing number of publications assessing impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems and fisheries attests to rising scientific and public interest. A selection of recent papers, dealing more with biological than social and economic aspects, is reviewed here, with particular attention to the reliability of projections of climate impacts on future fishery yields. The 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report expresses high confidence in projections that mid- and high-latitude fish catch potential will increase by 2050 and medium confidence that low-latitude catch potential will decline. These levels of confidence seem unwarranted, since many processes are either absent from or poorly represented in the models used, data are sparse and, unlike terrestrial crop projections, there are no controlled experiments. This review discusses methodological issues that affect our understanding of climate impacts, such as how to improve coupled models from physics to fish and how to strengthen confidence in analysis of time series.