World fisheries and climate trend

DELGADO, ANA LAURA; LÓPEZ ABBATE, MARÍA CELESTE

Marine ecology in a changing world

Science Publishers/CRC Press/Taylor&Francis

Lugar: New Hampshire; Año: 2014; p. 194 - 218

Climate oscillations have always occurred in history and natural systems have developed a capacity to adapt, by migrating to nearby stable domains. This ability will enable ecosystems to mitigate the impact of future changes, however, there are two factors which will limit the ecosystem adaptability, 1) the current exacerbated rate of climate change compared to previous natural changes, and 2) the restricted resilience of species as a result of human pressure which has caused overfishing, loss of biodiversity, habitat destruction, pollution and introduction of invasive species and pathogens (Brander 2010). The influence of human activities upgrade the impact of climate change over marine ecosystems, thus, recognizing the additive effect of both sources of extrinsic variability will help reduce the uncertainty when predicting the response of marine communities (Perry et al. 2010a). The concept of social-ecological systems (firstly proposed by Berkes and Folke, 1998) can be thought of as the interplay between two subsystems: the biophysical (including biology and climate) and the human (including cultural, management, economic, socio-political and ethical aspects), and has proved to be useful to assess the complex responses of ecosystems to global climate change (Perry et al. 2010a, Perry et al. 2010c). Fishing productivity has grown rapidly from 1950 until 1980 when maximum yield was reach, however, the global landings are currently stacked and might be decreasing (FAO 2007, Dow et al. 2009). Indeed, many commercially important fish populations have been declining in the past several decades (Myers and Worm 2003, Hutchings and Reynolds 2004), though it is not yet clarified the exact role of fishing and environmental change as underlying factors driving the changes (Hsieh et al. 2006). The goal of this chapter is to summarize the current and future impacts of climate-driven changes on the physiology and ecology of marine fishes, and how world fisheries are responding to the observed changes. The interaction between fish stocks and climate change is analyzed on the context of human disturbance. Finally, we present three case studies of fisheries in South-America vulnerable to the climate change and their future perspectives for mitigating the changes.