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The Nippon Foundation - University of British ColumbiaNEREUS PROGRAMPredicting Future Oceans

climate change

Climate change effects on illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing

| Latest News

A range of human pressures is threatening the sustainability of marine fisheries. Amongst those, overfishing, partly driven by Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing, is a major stressor. Thirty percent of global fish catch goes unreported, found a recent study by Nereus Program collaborator Sea Around Us.

But the relationship between IUU fishing and climate change is a new topic. I speculate that climate change impacts on fisheries may indirectly increase IUU fishing.

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Jellyfish for dinner: Is fishing a viable solution to the increase in jellyfish blooms?

| Policy Forum, Climate Change, Ecology and Biodiversity

While jellyfish, with their soft, gelatinous bodies, may seem like innocuous creatures, when they occur in large blooms they can often cause detrimental effects. Jellyfish blooms have been observed to clog power plants, cause mass mortality to fish in aquaculture farms, burst fishing nets and even sink a 10 tonne fishing vessel. It is predicted that jellyfish will benefit from climate change and other anthropogenic changes, such as overfishing, eutrophication and coastal development.

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Climate change could cut First Nations fisheries’ catch in half

| Publication Highlights, Climate Change, Fisheries

First Nations fisheries’ catch could decline by nearly 50 per cent by 2050, according to a new study examining the threat of climate change to the food and economic security of indigenous communities along coastal British Columbia, Canada.

“Climate change is likely to lead to declines in herring and salmon, which are among the most important species commercially, culturally, and nutritionally for First Nations,” said Lauren Weatherdon, who conducted the study when she was a UBC graduate student. “This could have large implications for communities who have been harvesting these fish and shellfish for millennia.”

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COP21: Policy strategies beyond CO2 emission targets

| Policy Forum, Climate Change

Based on the current trajectory of human-induced impacts on the environment, it is clear that we are pushing the oceans and marine ecosystems to unprecedented limits. Environmental changes in ocean properties have led to an array of ecological responses, from shifts in the composition of the ocean’s phytoplankton to changing distributions of fish species.

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COP21: Where have all the fish gone? How climate change is displacing marine species.

| Policy Forum, Climate Change, Oceanography

Climate change could affect temperatures all over the world, but what may not be immediately apparent is that climate change will affect ocean temperatures. If CO2 emission rates do not change, the average sea surface temperature is expected to increase by 2 to 3.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. This may not seem like much, but it would impact oceans in many ways, making them quite different from how they are today.

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Rebecca Asch gives lecture on climate change and seasonality in the oceans

| Latest News

Climate change is resulting in the earlier arrival of spring conditions in many ecosystems around the world. Rebecca Asch, Nereus Fellow (Princeton), gave a lecture at Wellesley College, USA, on November 13 entitled “Climate Change and Seasonality in the Oceans: How will Changing Seasonal Cycles Affect Marine Food Webs?” This was an invited talk sponsored by the Department of Biological Sciences.

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Ask an Expert: Will oceans be adequately discussed at COP21?

| Policy Forum, Climate Change, Law and Governance

From November 20 to December 11, leaders from more than 195 countries will meet in Paris to discuss the future of the planet. But will oceans be on the agenda?

COP21, the “Conference of Parties”, is the 21st United Nations Conference on Climate Change. It is being hyped as the most important climate event since COP15 in Copenhagen, which produced the Copenhagen Accord — a political agreement that was deemed by many to be unsuccessful. Here Yoshitaka Ota, Nereus Director (Policy), and William Cheung, Nereus Director (Science), discuss whether these negotiations will be successful, what’s at stake for the future of the world’s oceans, and what else can be done to mitigate the effects of climate change.

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Collaboration with Stockholm Resilience Centre on global fish biomass distribution model

| Latest News

Colleen Petrik, Senior Nereus Fellow at Princeton, visited the Stockholm Resilience Centre at the University of Stockholm from October 26 to 30 to collaborate with former Nereus Fellow James Watson. While with the Nereus Program, Watson developed a simulation model of global fish biomass distribution. This model demonstrated that the ability of fish to swim towards high food and growth environments had a drastic effect on the spatial distribution of fish biomass, especially that of top predators.

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THE NEREUS PROGRAM

The Nereus Program strives to explore a broad range of perspectives and scientific opinions on ocean sustainability, and to create an inclusive community of researchers and other marine professionals. This principle is founded on the Nippon Foundation’s vision of global capacity building to ensure that our oceans’ legacy is preserved and potential is protected for future generations.

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