According to an article published by ‘Nature’ in which CIM-UVigo researcher Elena Ojea participates and which addresses for the first time at a global level the relationship between fishing and aquaculture with climate change
In a scenario of progressive increase in the world population, researchers from universities and scientific institutions in the USA, Spain, Australia, Japan, Iceland, the Philippines and the United Kingdom point out, in an article published in Nature, that although climate change will test the capacity of the oceans to meet the growing demand for food, their production could be increased through rapid and ambitious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in addition to reforming capture fisheries and expanding sustainable mariculture (marine aquaculture). The authors of Expanding ocean food production under climate change emphasize in their work that the future of seafood depends on human responses to climate change, while warning that fisheries reforms, although necessary, will be insufficient to maintain per capita fish and shellfish production, even with aggressive reductions in emissions. However, the potential of sustainable mariculture, the researchers point out, could increase production, although these increases are subject to fisheries reforms, advances in feed production technologies, the establishment of effective mariculture, in addition to a drastic reduction in emissions. And, according to the authors of the article, climate change is not the most limiting factor for the sustainable expansion of mariculture.
Elena Ojea, a researcher in the Future Oceans Lab group at the Marine Research Center of the University of Vigo and the only Spanish author of the article published today in Nature, considers this work to be novel because “the relationship between fisheries and aquaculture under climate change has never been seen at a global level before, in the sense that fisheries production and mariculture can be compensated or planned at the country level under different future scenarios”. With a more transversal approach with a focus on marine food, in Expanding ocean food production under climate change “we focus on scenarios of decreasing emissions, we see that important reforms in fisheries are needed, such as international agreements and adaptive management”, she points out. However, the work concludes that, even if a comprehensive fisheries reform is carried out, which is necessary, there are locations where it will not be enough, and the impact of climate change will be negative and cannot be compensated for with adaptations. “In those cases, we see that a sustainable expansion of mariculture can offset losses from fishing. That is why we recommend the possibility of investing in sustainable marine aquaculture in those places,” explains Ojea.
Low-income countries in tropical regions are the most affected
The article, which also concludes that the reforms will be increasingly difficult to implement as climate change worsens, warns that their disproportionate effects on countries in low-income tropical regions could exacerbate existing economic problems. The authors of the research consider the outlined reforms to be ambitious but achievable, and although they recognize the improvement in management achieved in more than half of the world’s fisheries, they recall that the advances are focused on higher-income countries, so they must be applied in regions with fewer economic resources, thus contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The study, published today in Nature, should be considered, according to its authors, an approach to the problem that demonstrates that there is a wide potential for the expansion of sea food, but for local action more evidence and analysis will be needed that remain unseen at this level, such as access to resources for the local population, or the planning necessary to expand mariculture. However, the message of mitigating climate change to favor sea food in the future is clear and in this area all countries can collaborate with their commitments to reduce emissions”, Ojea details about the research carried out.
A cross-sectional and mechanistic view
Elena Ojea began collaborating with the sustainable fisheries group at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2013 and the article published today by Nature emerged from a stay in 2019, when they began working on a report for the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy (Ocean Panel), which eventually evolved into the publication Expanding ocean food production under climate change. “My participation began with the conception of the study together with the researchers at Santa Barbara, where during my postdoc we discussed how to project the impacts of climate change on fisheries production. Thanks to the technical and personnel capacity they have there, several analyses emerged combining climate and ecological models with economic projections and I was able to collaborate closely on these analyses and projections and helped interpret the results and implications for the future of marine food,” explains the researcher at the Future Oceans Lab at UVigo.
Ojea believes that participating in this research has provided her with a “transversal and mechanistic” vision to understand how global fisheries analyses are carried out under the impacts of climate change, “and there are few models that can be used and this publication arises from one of them. Thanks to this article and my work at the IPCC, I now have a deep vision of what we have behind the studies that appear, and of everything that science achieves and can improve”, considers the researcher.
The research activity of the Future Oceans Lab group has the support of the Xunta de Galicia and the European Union, through the co-financing of the CIM under the FEDER Galicia 2014-2020 Operational Program.
Source: DUVI
