


Climate-Adaptive Management
Find tools to adaptively manage your fishery
Fisheries are highly dynamic systems influenced by fluctuating environmental conditions, variable productivity of marine species, human fishing pressure, and changing market and socioeconomic conditions. As a result, fisheries management must be designed to be adaptive to changing conditions and community needs, especially in the face of climate change.
EDF has a suite of tools and resources to guide you in managing your fishery adaptively to allow you to build greater resilience in communities and ecosystems.
Related Tools
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The Framework for Integrated Stock and Habitat Evaluation (FISHE) Tool provides a step-by-step process that you can plug into, no matter where you are are in assessment or management, to integrate your existing efforts into a climate-adaptive process that can integrate new information and allow you to adjust your management strategies over time.

Tool
The Fishery Performance Indicators Tool can help you define a set of indicators to help you track and measure performance in your fishery, in alignment with your fishery goals.

Resource
New and Emerging Technologies for Sustainable Fisheries: A Comprehensive Landscape Analysis reviews how technology can help overcome key management challenges resulting from climate change.
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Fisheries management is always a dynamic process that must respond to fluctuations in environmental conditions, fishing behaviors, variable productivity of the resource, and changing market and economic conditions. Climate change is likely to make such fluctuations larger and result in new kinds of changes, such as shifts in species ranges and species composition. In addition, data- and resource-limited fisheries managers must often make management decisions in the face of data gaps that create uncertainties around the appropriate actions to implement, and the likely outcomes of those actions. In these fisheries it is therefore even more important to implement an adaptive management program that allows fisheries managers and stakeholders to re-visit fisheries goals, re-evaluate progress towards those goals, and re-examine the management measures that have been put in place to reach those goals based on new data, observations about fishery conditions, and learning from the outcomes of previous management decisions.
Developing a robust adaptive management framework provides managers with the means to re-evaluate and adjust decisions periodically based on observations about fishery conditions and from learning from the outcomes of previous management decisions.
Learn more about anticipating and planning for future change in your fishery