Meeting the Paris Agreement global warming target of 1.5°C will have large benefits to fisheries, finds a new Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program study published in Science. For every degree Celsius decrease in global warming, potential fish catches could increase by more than three million tonnes per year.
Fisheries Economics Research Unit (UBC) Research Associate Louise Teh, Nereus Director of Science William Cheung, and OceanCanada Director and Nereus Research Associate (Honourary) Rashid Sumaila recently had a paper (“Scenarios for investigating the future of Canada’s oceans and marine fisheries under environmental and socioeconomic change“) published in Regional Environmental Change, wherein they review existing methods of scenario analysis (preparing for future response based on multiple potential outcomes) in the marine conservation and fisheries sectors in Canada.
The study “Biogeochemical regions of the Mediterranean Sea: an objective multidimensional and multivariate environmental approach” was recently published in Progress in Oceanography with Nereus Fellow Gabriel Reygondeau (UBC) as the lead author. In the paper, a biogeochemical/ecological spatial framework was defined for ecosystems of the Mediterranean Sea.
Coastal Indigenous people eat, on average, 15 times more seafood per person than non-Indigenous people in the same country, finds a Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program study published today in PLOS ONE. This highlights the need to consider food sovereignty and cultural identity as part of fisheries policy and Indigenous human rights.
For the past ten years, Sea Around Us has been constructing a more accurate view of world fishery catches, finding, among other things, that 30% of catch goes unreported. Now the work of 400 researchers from 273 countries, led by Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller, has been compiled in a comprehensive 520-page book called the Global Atlas of Marine Fisheries.
“Spatial differentiation of marine eutrophication damage indicators based on species density” was recently published in Ecological Indicators, co-authored by Nereus Alumnus Miranda Jones (UNEP-WCMC) and Nereus Director of Science William Cheung. The paper looks at developing an index to assess eutrophication effects on marine ecosystems and introducing an ecosystem response indicator to nitrogen loadings to coastal waters.
In his newly published chapter “Wilderness protection in Estonia“, Richard Caddell, Nereus Fellow at Utrecht University, uses Estonia as a case study for European wilderness management. Estonia, Caddell writes, “has proved to be a nature conservation actor of understated significance”. Since the 13th century, Estonia has created protected wildlife areas, with little human intrusion, and has some of the most stringent legal controls over these areas in the EU.
This chapter explores recent and future impacts of rapid temperature changes in the North Sea, identified as a ‘hot spot’ of climate change, with respect to biological, operational, and economic concerns in fisheries. The region is one of the most important fishing grounds in the world.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released their Methodological Assessment of Scenarios & Models of Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services, for which Nereus Director of Science William Cheung was a coordinating lead author, as well as a contributing author for Chapter 5 “Modelling consequences of change in biodiversity for nature’s benefits to people” (200-243).
Global fisheries could lose approximately $10 billion of annual revenues by 2050 if climate change continues at current rates, and countries most dependent on fisheries for food and livelihoods will feel more of the effects, finds new Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program research published today in Scientific Reports.
