Decision Making And Economics Of Adaptation To Climate Change In The Fisheries And Aquaculture Sector

This publication reviews available information on the costs and benefits of climate change adaptation in the fisheries and aquaculture sector, highlights the challenges in applying conventional appraisal and decision support tools to adaptation and reviews emerging frameworks (including low-regret actions, addressing potential lock-in, and early planning for long-term adaptation) as well as economic tools to appraise adaptation options in fisheries and aquaculture.

This book highlights the economic and policy aspects of adapting fisheries to climate change, including strengthening global governance; a broader use of rights-based management; ecosystem protection; the ending of environmental harmful subsidies and use of aquaculture.

This book highlights the economic and policy aspects of adapting fisheries to climate change, including strengthening global governance; a broader use of rights-based management; ecosystem protection; the ending of environmental harmful subsidies and use of aquaculture.

This report aims to accelerate climate change adaptation implementation in fisheries management throughout the world. It showcases how flexibility can be introduced in the fisheries management cycle in order to foster adaptation, strengthen the resilience of fisheries, reduce their vulnerability to climate change, and enable managers to respond in a timely manner to the projected changes in the dynamics of marine resources and ecosystems. The publication includes a set of good practices for climate-adaptive fisheries management that have proven their effectiveness and can be adapted to different contexts, providing a range of options for stakeholders including the fishing industry, fishery managers, policymakers and others involved in decision-making. These good practices were linked to one or more of the three common climate-related impacts on fisheries resources: distributional change; productivity change; and species composition change. Therefore, these three impacts can serve as practical entry points to guide decision-makers in identifying good practice adaptation measures suitable for their local contexts. These good practices are based upon transferable experiences and lessons learned from the thirteen case studies across the globe and hopefully will contribute to greater uptake and implementation of climate-adaptive fisheries management measures on the ground.

Vulnerability and risk assessment is an important tool that has been used in the fisheries and aquaculture sector to assess the current and potential consequences of climate change in a variety of geographical, environmental and socio-economic contexts and scales. The resulting information on risks and vulnerabilities can then feed decision-making on adaptation, including allocation of resources and prioritization of areas for action. However, there is no harmonized approach nor methodology to conduct vulnerability and risk assessments. This publication seeks to analyze the different existing methodologies in order to contribute to laying the basis of a consistent approach to design future climate vulnerability and risk assessments in the fisheries and aquaculture sector. The publication builds on the findings outlined in the FAO Technical Papers No. 597 “Assessing climate change vulnerability in fisheries and aquaculture - Available methodologies and their relevance for the sector” and No. 627 “Impacts of climate change on fisheries and aquaculture - Synthesis of current knowledge, adaptation and mitigation options” and explores the recent advances in approaches of vulnerability and risk assessments, and the methodological developments to conduct such assessments.

This report indicates that climate change will significantly affect the availability and trade of fish products, especially for those countries most dependent on the sector, and calls for effective adaptation and mitigation actions encompassing food production.

This Expert Workshop was convened to identify and review the key issues of climate change in relation to fisheries and aquaculture, from the physical changes, the impacts of those on aquatic resources and ecosystems and how these ecological impacts translate into human dimensions of coping and adapting within fisheries and aquaculture. Three comprehensive background documents formed the basis of the technical discussions. The Workshop also evaluated policy options and activities at the international, regional and national levels that can help minimize negative impacts of climate change, improve on mitigation and prevention, and maintain and build adaptive capacity to climate change. The impetus for the Workshop emerged from recommendations of the twenty-seventh session of COFI (2007) as well as to the need to provide inputs into the FAO High-Level Conference on World Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy, held in Rome from 3 to 5 June 2008.