Realistic fisheries management reforms could mitigate the impacts of climate change in most countries

RESEARCH ARTICLE Realistic fisheries management reforms could mitigate the impacts of climate change in most countries Christopher M. FreeID1*, Tracey Mangin1, Jorge Garcı´a Molinos2,3,4, Elena Ojea5, Merrick Burden6, Christopher Costello1, Steven D. Gaines1 1 Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America, 2 Arctic Research Center, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, 3 Global Station for Arctic Research, Global Institution for Collaborative Research and Education, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, 4 Graduate School of Environmental Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, 5 Future Oceans Lab, CIM-UVigo, University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain, 6 Environmental Defense Fund, New York, New York, United States of America * cfree14@gmail.com Abstract Although climate change is altering the productivity and distribution of marine fisheries, climate-adaptive fisheries management could mitigate many of the negative impacts on human society. We forecast global fisheries biomass, catch, and profits to 2100 under three climate scenarios (RCPs 4.5, 6.0, 8.5) and five levels of management reform to (1) deter- mine the impact of climate change on national fisheries and (2) quantify the national-scale benefits of implementing climate-adaptive fisheries reforms. Management reforms account- ing for shifting productivity and shifting distributions would yield higher catch and profits in the future relative to today for 60–65% of countries under the two least severe climate sce-

narios but for only 35% of countries under the most severe scenario. Furthermore, these management reforms would yield higher cumulative catch and profits than business-as- usual management for nearly all countries under the two least severe climate scenarios but would yield lower cumulative catch for 40% of countries under the most severe scenario. Fortunately, perfect fisheries management is not necessary to achieve these benefits: trans- boundary cooperation with 5-year intervals between adaptive interventions would result in comparable outcomes. However, the ability for realistic management reforms to offset the negative impacts of climate change is bounded by changes in underlying biological produc- tivity. Although realistic reforms could generate higher catch and profits for 23–50% of coun- tries experiencing reductions in productivity, the remaining countries would need to develop, expand, and reform aquaculture and other food production sectors to offset losses in cap- ture fisheries. Still, climate-adaptive management is more profitable than business-as-usual management in all countries and we provide guidance on implementing–and achieving the benefits of–climate-adaptive fisheries reform along a gradient of scientific, management, and enforcement capacities. PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224347 March 5, 2020 1 / 21 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Free CM, Mangin T, Molinos JG, Ojea E, Burden M, Costello C, et al. (2020) Realistic fisheries management reforms could mitigate the

impacts of climate change in most countries. PLoS ONE 15(3): e0224347. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0224347 Editor: Judi Hewitt, University of Waikato, NEW ZEALAND Received: October 10, 2019 Accepted: February 6, 2020 Published: March 5, 2020 Copyright: © 2020 Free et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All data are available here: https://github.com/SFG-UCSB/cc_trade. Funding: This work was funded by the Environmental Defense Fund. J.G.M. was supported by the “Tenure-Track System Promotion Program” of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). E.O. was supported by the European Research Council project CLOCK (GA. 679812) and GAIN- Xunta de Galicia Oportunius program. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and