• Energy Research

Climate change is already impacting coastal communities, and ongoing and future shifts in fisheries species productivity from climate change have implications for the livelihoods and cultures of coastal communities. Harvested marine species in the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem support U.S. West Coast communities economically, socially, and culturally. Ecological vulnerability assessments exist for individual species in the California Current but ecological and human vulnerability are linked and vulnerability is expected to vary by community. Here, we present automatable, reproducible methods for assessing the vulnerability of U.S. West Coast fishing dependent communities to climate change within a social-ecological vulnerability framework. We first assessed the ecological risk of marine resources, on which fishing communities rely, to 50 years of climate change projections. We then combined this with the adaptive capacity of fishing communities, based on social indicators, to assess the potential ability of communities to cope with future changes. Specific communities (particularly in Washington state) were determined to be at risk to climate change mainly due to economic reliance on at risk marine fisheries species, like salmon, hake, or sea urchins. But, due to higher social adaptive capacity, these communities were often not found to be the most vulnerable overall. Conversely, certain communities that were not the most at risk, ecologically and economically, ranked in the category of highly vulnerable communities due to low adaptive capacity based on social indicators (particularly in Southern California). Certain communities were both ecologically at risk due to catch composition and socially vulnerable (low adaptive capacity) leading to the highest tier of vulnerability. The integration of climatic, ecological, economic, and societal data reveals that factors underlying vulnerability are variable across fishing communities on the U.S West Coast, and suggests the need to develop a variety of well-aligned strategies to adapt to the ecological impacts of climate change.

Abstract Climate change drives species distribution shifts, impacting the availability of resources people rely upon for food and livelihoods. These impacts are complex, manifest at local scales and have diverse effects across multiple species. Yet, for wild capture fisheries current understanding is dominated by predictions for individual species at coarse spatial scales. We show that localized environmental changes that vary across species will alter the ensemble of co-occurring fishery species within established fishing footprints along the U.S. West Coast. We demonstrate that availability of the most economically-valuable, primary target species is highly likely to decline coastwide in response to warming and reduced oxygen concentrations, while availability of the most abundant, secondary target species will potentially increase. A spatial reshuffling of primary and secondary target species suggests regionally heterogeneous opportunities for fishers to adapt by changing where or what they fish. Developing foresight into the collective responses of species at local scales will enable more effective and tangible adaptation pathways for fishing communities.

A major challenge in sustainability science is identifying targets that maximize ecosystem benefits to humanity while minimizing the risk of crossing critical system thresholds. One critical threshold is the biomass at which populations become so depleted that their population growth rates become negative—depensation. Here, we evaluate how the value of monitoring information increases as a natural resource spends more time near the critical threshold. This benefit emerges because higher monitoring precision promotes higher yield and a greater capacity to recover from overharvest. We show that precautionary buffers that trigger increased monitoring precision as resource levels decline may offer a way to minimize monitoring costs and maximize profits. In a world of finite resources, improving our understanding of the trade-off between precision in estimates of population status and the costs of mismanagement will benefit stakeholders that shoulder the burden of these economic and social costs.

Significance Climate shocks are increasingly disruptive to global food systems, with far-reaching consequences for resource-based communities. Yet quantitative assessments of community impacts rarely account for economic connectivity between alternative resources. We show that patterns of resource use influence the sensitivity of US West Coast fishing communities to unprecedented fishery closures in the wake of a recent climate shock. Patterns of participation in commercial fisheries were significantly altered during the fishery closures, but rebounded to preexisting states after closures were lifted, indicating community-level resilience to this particular perturbation. Our study provides evidence that more complex networks of resource use buffer the impact of climate shocks, and reveals strategies that alter emergent patterns of resource use in affected fishing communities.

AbstractMany marine species are shifting their distributions in response to changing ocean conditions, posing significant challenges and risks for fisheries management. Species distribution models (SDMs) are used to project future species distributions in the face of a changing climate. Information to fit SDMs generally comes from two main sources: fishery‐independent (scientific surveys) and fishery‐dependent (commercial catch) data. A concern with fishery‐dependent data is that fishing locations are not independent of the underlying species abundance, potentially biasing predictions of species distributions. However, resources for fishery‐independent surveys are increasingly limited; therefore, it is critical we understand the strengths and limitations of SDMs developed from fishery‐dependent data. We used a simulation approach to evaluate the potential for fishery‐dependent data to inform SDMs and abundance estimates and quantify the bias resulting from different fishery‐dependent sampling scenarios in the California Current System (CCS). We then evaluated the ability of the SDMs to project changes in the spatial distribution of species over time and compare the time scale over which model performance degrades between the different sampling scenarios and as a function of climate bias and novelty. Our results show that data generated from fishery‐dependent sampling can still result in SDMs with high predictive skill several decades into the future, given specific forms of preferential sampling which result in low climate bias and novelty. Therefore, fishery‐dependent data may be able to supplement information from surveys that are reduced or eliminated for budgetary reasons to project species distributions into the future.

AbstractRecent warnings from scientists suggest there is limited time to enact policies to avert wide‐ranging ecological and social damage from climate change. In the United States, discussions about comprehensive national policies to avert climate change have begun, with “Green New Deal” proposals and climate plans put forth by members of Congress and presidential candidates. Oceans are largely absent or separate from these nascent policy proposals. Here, we highlight a policy framework to develop terrestrial and ocean‐integrated policies that can complement and enhance terrestrial‐focused initiatives focused on four specific sectors: 1) energy; 2) transportation; 3) food security; and 4) habitat restoration. Given political friction and constrained budgets, an integrated policy framework offers greater potential to achieve a portfolio of mitigation and adaptation goals in a cost‐effective manner, beyond what could be realized with marine or terrestrial policy solutions alone.

The West Coast of the U.S. has a vast offshore wind energy (OWE) electricity generation potential with value on the order of billions of USD, and pressure is mounting to develop large OWE projects. However, this seascape has numerous existing resource extraction uses, including a multi-billion dollar commercial fishing industry, which create the potential for conflict. To date, spatially explicit comparisons of OWE and commercial fisheries value have not been done, but are essential for marine spatial planning and for investigating the tradeoffs of OWE development on existing marine uses. In this analysis, we generate maps of OWE levelized cost of energy and of total economic activity generated by the top eight commercial fishing targets that account for the vast majority (~84%) of landed revenue off the U.S. West Coast. We quantify spatial overlap between these two ocean uses and use multiobjective optimization to develop tradeoff frontiers to investigate implications for both sectors from established state goals or mandates for OWE power generation capacity. There are clear differences in the exposure of each fishery in their traditional fishing grounds as a function of differing OWE capacity goals and outcomes vary depending on whether OWE development goals are achieved at a state-by-state level or a region-wide level. Responsible siting of OWE projects includes careful consideration of existing commercial fishing activities, and responsible transition to renewable energies on the West Coast and elsewhere accounts for the socio-economic consequences of the total economic activity associated with each fishery.

AbstractProjecting the future distributions of commercially and ecologically important species has become a critical approach for ecosystem managers to strategically anticipate change, but large uncertainties in projections limit climate adaptation planning. Although distribution projections are primarily used to understand the scope of potential change—rather than accurately predict specific outcomes—it is nonetheless essential to understand where and why projections can give implausible results and to identify which processes contribute to uncertainty. Here, we use a series of simulated species distributions, an ensemble of 252 species distribution models, and an ensemble of three regional ocean climate projections, to isolate the influences of uncertainty from earth system model spread and from ecological modeling. The simulations encompass marine species with different functional traits and ecological preferences to more broadly address resource manager and fishery stakeholder needs, and provide a simulated true state with which to evaluate projections. We present our results relative to the degree of environmental extrapolation from historical conditions, which helps facilitate interpretation by ecological modelers working in diverse systems. We found uncertainty associated with species distribution models can exceed uncertainty generated from diverging earth system models (up to 70% of total uncertainty by 2100), and that this result was consistent across species traits. Species distribution model uncertainty increased through time and was primarily related to the degree to which models extrapolated into novel environmental conditions but moderated by how well models captured the underlying dynamics driving species distributions. The predictive power of simulated species distribution models remained relatively high in the first 30 years of projections, in alignment with the time period in which stakeholders make strategic decisions based on climate information. By understanding sources of uncertainty, and how they change at different forecast horizons, we provide recommendations for projecting species distribution models under global climate change.