Abstract
There is broad evidence of climate change causing shifts in fish distribution worldwide, but less is known about the response of fisheries to these changes. Responses to climate‐driven shifts in a fishery may be constrained by existing management or institutional arrangements and technological settings. In order to understand how fisheries are responding to ocean warming, we investigate purse seine fleets targeting tropical tunas in the east Atlantic Ocean using effort and sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA) data from 1991 to 2017. An analysis of the spatial change in effort using a centre of gravity approach and empirical orthogonal functions is used to assess the spatiotemporal changes in effort anomalies and investigate links to SSTA. Both analyses indicate that effort shifts southward from the equator, while no clear pattern is seen northward from the equator. Random forest models show that while technology and institutional settings better explain total effort, SSTA is playing a role when explaining the spatiotemporal changes of effort, together with management and international agreements. These results show the potential of management to minimize the impacts of climate change on fisheries activity. Our results provide guidance for improved understanding about how climate, management and governance interact in tropical tuna fisheries, with methods that are replicable and transferable. Future actions should take into account all these elements in order to plan successful adaptation.
Highlights
Fisheries are expected to satisfy an increasing proportion of global protein demand in the future, but can only do this if managed sustainably (Barange et al, 2018; Merino et al, 2012)
Effort data from the ICCAT and sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA) data have been used to evaluate whether climate change is impacting the effort distribution of purse seine (PS) fisheries operating in the east Atlantic Ocean
The variables with the largest percentage of increase in the mean squared error are the most important predictors, which are the number of vessels allowed by Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreements (SFPAs), SSTA and the presence/absence of a Total Allowable Catches (TACs) in the case of PC1 effort anomaly (effortA) (Figure 4a) and technology represented by the proportion of catch on fishing aggregation devices (FADs) and agr_vessel in the case of effort (Figure 4b)
Summary
Fisheries are expected to satisfy an increasing proportion of global protein demand in the future, but can only do this if managed sustainably (Barange et al, 2018; Merino et al, 2012). We investigate evidence of climate change affecting the recent distribution of tropical tuna fisheries using time series analyses of effort data.
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