SEAwise Report on fisheries spatial distribution responding to climate-related factors and ecological change

The SEAwise project works to deliver a fully operational tool that will allow fishers, managers, and policy makers to easily apply Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) in their fisheries. This SEAwise report describes how fisheries respond to climate-related factors and changes in spatial distributions of fish stocks. It combines results of the SEAwise Report on historic and future spatial distribution of fished stocks and fisheries distribution models to link species distribution with fleet behaviour, based on information on historic fisheries distribution to help understand the causes of changes in fisheries distribution. Fishing effort data to calibrate and fit different models was derived based on VMS and AIS observations for the case studies in the project. The models of fishing effort distribution was fitted to spatial distributions of target species and climate variables and predictions were made using forecasts for species distributions were obtained from Sys et al. (2022).

In the North Sea, two individual behaviour models were applied to forecast the response of fisheries to climate change. Several fleets were considered, all fishing for demersal species. In the Mediterranean, two descriptive effort models were used that directly linked fishing effort to target species distributions, and used the observed relations to forecast future fishing effort distributions. Overall, we found limited effects of climate change on the case study fisheries, probably because we focused on demersal species that will likely exhibit smaller distribution changes under climate change. However, future changes in fisheries management targets, access regulations, international agreements, fish and fuel prices, technological developments, and marine spatial planning will likely play an equally or more important role in shaping future fisheries as climate change over the next few decades (Hamon et al. 2020). Fisheries scenarios for summarizing different pathways, including future developments in fuel and fish price have recently been developed and should be further explored.

Read more about the project at www.seawiseproject.org