Impacts of climate change on fisheries and aquaculture: synthesis of current knowledge, adaptation and mitigation options
New analysis and modelling released by FAO and more than 100 collaborating scientists projects that by 2050 climate change will have altered the productivity of many of the planet's marine and freshwater fisheries, affecting the livelihoods of millions of the worlds' poorest people. While the productive potential of fisheries in exclusive marine economic zones (EEZs) — those 200-mile wide swathes of land-adjacent ocean territory that every coastal nation has special rights to exploit — could decline less than 12 percent on average, this masks more significant fluctuations of productive potential at regional level, models suggest. The planet's critical but often-overlooked inland water systems — which include five of the world's least-developed countries among its top 10 fish producers and provides 11.6 million tonnes of food for human consumption each year — will also be affected, the report says. These impacts are linked to changes in water temperature and pH levels, shifts in ocean circulation patterns, rising sea levels and altered rainfall and storm patterns causing species to change their distributions and productivity, corals to bleach, and aquatic diseases to become more common, among others. The projections appear in a sweeping 654-page collection of global, regional and national analysis and information released by FAO, which represents the most comprehensive publication on climate change and fisheries ever assembled. Impacts of climate change on fisheries and aquaculture: Synthesis of current knowledge, adaptation and mitigation options includes both new research as well as unique synthesis of the most current scientific information on how a changing climate is altering the world's oceans, lakes and rivers and reshaping the lives of the communities who rely on them.