How Climate Change Could Deplete Fish Stocks
May 1, 2018
On Monday, William Cheung and Rashid Sumaila were featured in a Toronto Star article covering the burgeoning complexities of Pacific Salmon management due to climate change and its transnational impacts.
According to Cheung, the way data is used to figure out safe guidelines for fisheries could quickly be rendered useless by the effects of a warming planet. “Climate change is actually changing the baseline that fisheries management measures are working on,” Cheung said. “So it’s likely those (measures) that are working now … they may not work in the near future.” As a result, Cheung calls for more adaptive data and the upgrading of international agreements that are presently based on the now flawed baseline data.
For Ussif Rashid Sumaila, the problem is that “We have boundaries for administrative convenience, but the fish don’t know this and they don’t really care.” Ultimately, the salmon cross freely between Canada and United States and according to Ussif, this is likely to become more prevalent because of climate change.
Read the whole article about the need to update our fisheries governance, click here.
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