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Ending overfishing can mitigate impacts of climate change

Ending overfishing can mitigate impacts of climate change. U. Rashid Sumaila Fisheries Economics Research Unit Global Fisheries Cluster The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada r.sumaila@oceans.ubc.ca @DrRashidSumaila. Our Fish Convened Webinar Sep 2, 2019.

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Ending overfishing can mitigate impacts of climate change

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  1. Ending overfishing can mitigate impacts of climate change U. Rashid Sumaila Fisheries Economics Research Unit Global Fisheries Cluster The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada r.sumaila@oceans.ubc.ca @DrRashidSumaila Our Fish Convened Webinar Sep 2, 2019

  2. Outline of Webinar • Overfishing; • Climate change impacts; • Overfishing and climate resilience; • How to end overfishing; • Concluding remarks.

  3. Overfishing as captured by fishing down marine food web (Pauly et al. 1998)

  4. Ocean warming, acidification and deoxygenation • The ocean has become: • warmer (with the world struggling to limit the increase in average temperature to 2oC into the future); • with less sea-ice (summer Arctic sea ice extent is decreasing at 7.4% per decade); • more acidic (acidity projected to triple in the future); • less oxygenated in some area, higher sea level.

  5. Fisheries implications of climate change Changes in fisheries catch, fisheries economics, fisheries management, food security Changes in community structure, trophic interactions, biodiversity • CLIMTE CHANGE • Temperature • Salinity • Hypoxia • Acidification Changes in population growth, abundance, species distribution Changes in body size, reproduction, primary productivity, habitats Organism Population Community/ ecosystems Fisheries Sumaila et al. (2011): Nature Climate Change

  6. A declining ocean has serious human consequences

  7. How ending overfishing can increase fish stock resilience to CC • Fishing <= MSY will increase fish biomass and therefore more resilient fish and ocean; • A more complete marine food web means a more diverse ecosystem; • Reduced ocean habitat destruction means fish will be in a better position to thrive.

  8. How ending overfishing can increase fish stock resilience to CC • Fishing <= MSY would reduce species extinction risk under climate change by up to 63% (Cheung et al. 2018); • Reducing fishing effort will result in: • gains in catch even under climate change (Gaines et al. 2018); • mitigating climate change in of itself: less burning of carbon and higher sequestration by marine life.

  9. How to end overfishing • Remove the incentive to overfish: • Improve national fisheries management; • Push for regional cooperative management; • Make illegal fishing unprofitable; • Buy insurance by creating MPAs; • Discipline &redirect harmful subsidies; • Think one global ocean.

  10. To end overfishing, policies & actions should be … Positive Feedback Marine Conservation People Wellbeing • Two examples: • Subsidies • Marine protection Negative Feedback … designed to eliminate negative & promote positive feedbacks

  11. Subsidies fuel negative feedback Small versus large scale fisheries Schuhbauer, Sumaila et al. (2017) Marine Policy

  12. ` There is one global ocean The depletion of stocks in one part (e.g. the high-seas) can influence the availability of fish to other parts. Exclusive economic zones (light blue) and high seas (dark blue)

  13. Concluding remarks • Ending overfishing now would: • strengthen the ocean, making it more capable of withstanding climate change impacts; • contribute to mitigating climate change. • A healthy person is more likely to survive an epidemic than a person who is less healthy, and because of overfishing we have severely weakened the ocean’s immune system; • In this way people and the ocean are not that different.

  14. Thanks for your attention! and Thanks to Our Fish for making this Webinar possible

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