Climate-Adaptive Management

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.

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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