The Environmental Defense Fund is introducing the concept of climate resilience in marine fisheries through a new, three-part video series called “Fishing for Resilience.
There are three main topics covered in this video series.
First, climate change is often only one of several things impacting an ocean ecosystem. When you add up all these factors and consider them together, the effect is a cumulative one. From this perspective, one way to counteract the effect of climate change is to deal with these other impacts. When climate change is thought of as a problem that is cumulative to other impacts, we can see that there are often many ways to help ecosystems thrive.
Second, sustainability practice has served us well where we’ve successfully deployed it — and it should continue to serve us well in the face of climate change. But we will have to deploy some of these practices differently as climate change scrambles things around. Sustainability in the face of climate change means adjusting catch levels as conditions change, shifting management across space as species move, and more.
Third is the practice of resilience, which looks a little bit different than sustainability practice but complements it. These are things that can help an ecosystem resist, recover or adapt to climate change. These include elements like ensuring diversity is present within the ecosystem, enhancing our adaptive capacity, and appropriately using buffers to hedge against unexpected shocks.
“Fishing for Resilience” is but an introduction to the topic of climate resilience in marine fisheries. EDF will continue to find ways to help translate the concept of climate resilience into reality and to encourage and inform stakeholders about what we can do to reach climate resilience together.
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