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

changing productivity will be a challenge in even the most sophisticated fisheries systems [15,37] and evaluate a more realistic scenario that implements well-intentioned, yet imperfect, adaptation to productivity shifts. These expansions are important because they place more realistic bounds on the ability for management to mitigate the impacts of climate change and present practitioners with a tool for investigating the impacts of climate change and opportu- nities for reform in their respective country’s fisheries. Our model predicts shifts in productivity that are consistent in both pattern and magnitude with a recent ensemble model [5] that averaged the predictions of six other peer-reviewed marine ecosystem models. We estimated 2.0% and 18.5% decreases in maximum sustainable yield from 2012–2100 under RCPs 4.5 and 8.5, respectively. By comparison, Lotze et al. [5] esti- mated 8.6% (±6.0% SD) and 17.2% (±10.7% SD) decreases in marine animal biomass in the absence of fishing from 1990–2100 under the same two emissions scenarios. The Lotze et al. [5] ensemble model, its constituent models, and our model all predict increases in productivity in poleward regions and decreases in productivity in tropical to temperate regions. The slight differences in the productivity shifts predicted by our model and the ensemble model are unsurprising given the differences in the structure, mechanistic drivers, and taxonomic scope of our model and the ensemble’s constituent models. Importantly, however, our approach differs from these studies, because, in addition to fore-

casting the impact of climate change on the biological potential of fisheries, we consider the impact of alternative human responses to these changes, which could either exacerbate or alleviate the impacts of changing biological potential [13]. Indeed, our results indicate that all countries would benefit from reforming current management to account for shifting distribu- tions and productivity and that many countries could even see higher catch and profits than Fig 6. Percent difference in cumulative catch and cumulative profits from 2012–2100 relative to business-as-usual for 156 countries under three emissions scenarios (columns) and two adaptation scenarios (rows). The percentage labels indicate the percentage of countries falling in each quadrant of catch and profit outcomes. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224347.g006 PLOS ONE Realistic fisheries management reforms could mitigate the impacts of climate change in most countries PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224347 March 5, 2020 12 / 21