Climate Change's Greatest Impact on Fishing Nations

With climate change threatening to destroy coral reefs, push salt water into freshwater habitats and produce more coastal storms, millions of struggling people in fishery-dependent nations of Africa, Asia and South America could face unprecedented hardship, according to a new study published today in the February issue of the peer-reviewed journal Fish and Fisheries. The study, by a team of scientists at the WorldFish Center, the University of East Anglia, Simon Fraser University, the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, the University of Bremen, and the Mekong River Commission, is the first to identify individual nations that are "highly vulnerable" to the impact of climate change on fisheries.

The authors of the report examined 132 national economies to determine which are the most vulnerable, based on environmental, fisheries, dietary and economic factors. Countries that need the most attention, they said, are not necessarily the places that will experience the greatest environmental impacts on their fisheries. Rather, they are countries where fish play a large role in diet, income and trade yet there is a lack of capacity to adapt to problems caused by climate change—such as loss of coral reef habitats to the bleaching effects of warmer waters and lakes parched by an increase in heat and a decrease in precipitation. For example, fish accounts for 27 percent or more of daily protein intake in vulnerable countries—compared to 13 percent in non-vulnerable nations—and there are scant resources for alternative sources of protein.

Both coastal and landlocked countries in Africa, including Malawi, Guinea, Senegal and Uganda, four Asian tropical countries—Bangladesh, Cambodia, Pakistan and Yemen—and two countries in South America, Peru and Colombia, were identified as the most economically vulnerable to the effects of global warming on fisheries. Overall, of the 33 countries that were considered highly vulnerable, 19 are already classified by the United Nations as "least developed" due to their particularly poor socioeconomic conditions.

Something for the economists that read this to consider.

Also, Noel, that Titanoboa fossil I linked to the story for has implications for the previous post on Huber's hypothesis on tropical plant growth getting trashed during an Eocene-esque warming event would be questionable: Titanoboa was not a desert critter and required the temperature average to be around 5 C + more than now in that region to get the growth observed.