Abstract
Climate-driven redistribution of tuna threatens to disrupt the economies of Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and sustainable management of the world’s largest tuna fishery. Here we show that by 2050, under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario (RCP 8.5), the total biomass of three tuna species in the waters of ten Pacific SIDS could decline by an average of 13% (range = −5% to −20%) due to a greater proportion of fish occurring in the high seas. The potential implications for Pacific Island economies in 2050 include an average decline in purse-seine catch of 20% (range = −10% to −30%), an average annual loss in regional tuna-fishing access fees of US$90 million (range = −US$40 million to –US$140 million) and reductions in government revenue of up to 13% (range = −8% to −17%) for individual Pacific SIDS. Redistribution of tuna under a lower-emissions scenario (RCP 4.5) is projected to reduce the purse-seine catch from the waters of Pacific SIDS by an average of only 3% (range = −12% to +9%), indicating that even greater reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, in line with the Paris Agreement, would provide a pathway to sustainability for tuna-dependent Pacific Island economies. An additional pathway involves Pacific SIDS negotiating within the regional fisheries management organization to maintain the present-day benefits they receive from tuna, regardless of the effects of climate change on the distribution of the fish.
Highlights
Fishing for tuna plays a vital role in the economic development and/or food security of most of the 22 Pacific Island countries and territories[1,2]
More than 95% of all tuna caught from the jurisdictions of the 22 Pacific Island countries and territories comes from the combined exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of these 10 Small Island Developing States (SIDS) (Supplementary Table 1), and access fees paid by industrial fishing fleets provide an average of 37% of their government revenue (Supplementary Table 2)
We modelled the responses of tuna biomass to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5, RCP 4.5 and RCP 2.6 emissions scenarios for 2050 in the EEZs of Pacific SIDS, focusing on the ten tuna-dependent SIDS (Fig. 1), and in high-seas areas
Summary
Fishing for tuna plays a vital role in the economic development and/or food security of most of the 22 Pacific Island countries and territories[1,2]. More than 95% of all tuna caught from the jurisdictions of the 22 Pacific Island countries and territories comes from the combined exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of these 10 SIDS (Supplementary Table 1), and access fees paid by industrial fishing fleets provide an average of 37% (range = 4−84%) of their government revenue (excluding grants) (Supplementary Table 2) These extraordinary benefits have been secured mainly through cooperative management of the purse-seine fishery within the combined EEZs of nine of the ten Pacific SIDS under the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) Vessel Day Scheme (VDS) (Box 1). The projected patterns of tuna redistribution are used to identify the most promising pathways for enabling tuna-dependent economies to retain the socioeconomic benefits they receive from tuna
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