It has proven extremely challenging for researchers to predict with confidence how human societies might develop in the future, yet managers and industries need to make projections in order to test adaptation and mitigation strategies designed to build resilience to long-term shocks. This paper introduces exploratory scenarios with a particular focus on European aquaculture and fisheries and describes how these scenarios were designed. Short-, medium- and long-term developments in socio-political drivers may be just as important in determining profits, revenues and prospects in the aquaculture and fisheries industries as physical drivers such as long-term climate change. Four socio-political-economic futures were developed, based partly on the IPCC SRES (Special Report on Emissions Scenarios) framework and partly on the newer system of Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs). ‘Off the shelf’ narrative material as well as quantitative outputs were ‘borrowed’ from earlier frameworks but supplemented with material generated through in-depth stakeholder workshops involving industry and policy makers. Workshop participants were tasked to outline how they thought their sector might look under the four future worlds and, in particular, to make use of the PESTEL conceptual framework (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal) as an aide memoire to help define the scope of each scenario. This work was carried out under the auspices of the EU Horizon 2020 project CERES (Climate change and European aquatic RESources), and for each ‘CERES scenario’ (World Markets, National Enterprise, Global Sustainability and Local Stewardship), additional quantitative outputs were generated, including projections of future fuel and fish prices, using the MAGNET (Modular Applied GeNeral Equilibrium Tool) modeling framework. In developing and applying the CERES scenarios, we have demonstrated that the basic architecture is sufficiently flexible to be used at a wide diversity of scales. We urge the climate science community to adopt a similar scenarios framework, based around SSPs, to facilitate global cross-comparison of fisheries and aquaculture model outputs more broadly and to harmonize communication regarding potential future bioeconomic impacts of climate change.

Kreiss et al. Future Socio-Political Scenarios Aquaculture returns, and marketing options as opposed to the direct effect of climate-driven changes in the environment. These results can inform adaptation planning by the European aquaculture sector. Moreover, applying consistent scenarios including societal and economic dimensions, facilitates regional to global comparisons of adaptation advice both within and across Blue Growth sectors.

Climate change is anticipated to have long-term and widespread direct consequences for the European marine ecosystems and subsequently for the European fishery sector. Additionally, many socio-economic and political factors linked to climate change scenarios will impact the future development of fishing industries. Robust projection modeling of bioeconomic consequences of climate change on the European fishing sector must identify all these factors and their potential future interaction. In this study, four socio-political scenarios developed in the EU project CERES (Climate change and European aquatic RESources) were operationalized and used in model projections of marine wild capture fisheries. Four CERES scenarios (“World Markets,” “National Enterprise,” “Global Sustainability” and “Local Stewardship”) were based on the IPCC framework of Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs). For each of these scenarios, a set of quantitative outputs was generated to allow projections of bio-economic impacts to mid-century (2050) on wild-capture fisheries operating in different European regions. Specifically, projections accounted for future changes in fisheries management targets, access regulations, international agreements, fish and fuel prices, technological developments and marine spatial planning. This study thoroughly describes the elements of these four fisheries scenarios and demonstrates an example of the “regionalization” of these scenarios by summarizing how they were applied to the North Sea flatfish fishery. Bioeconomic projections highlight the importance of future developments in fuel and fish price development to the viability of that and other fisheries. Adapting these scenarios for use in other models and regions outside the 10 European fisheries examined in CERES would be highly beneficial by allowing direct comparison of the bioeconomic risks and opportunities posed by climate change.

Environmental, political, and economic conditions influence fishermen's decisions, which in turn have consequences on the profitability of fishing fleets. We applied the bioeconomic model FishRent to understand the response of eight fleets operating in the Northeast Atlantic mackerel and North Sea autumn spawning herring fishery to a number of scenarios, including changes in recruitment, the quota allocation key, and disruptions in fish and fuel prices. In all scenarios, both the Irish and German fleets were close to the break-even point, making them more vulnerable to additional disturbances than other fleets. Yet, these events are expected to occur simultaneously and a larger margin between costs and revenue would enhance the fleets resilience. The replacement of the historical quota allocation key to countries by an allocation according to biomass distribution negatively affected the German fleet most (−450% profitable within 1 year from 2020 to 2021), followed by the Dutch and Danish fleets (−175% profitable on average among those fleets), while the United Kingdom and Ireland increased their profitability by more than 250%. The differences among fleets highlights the sensitivity of a historical allocation key revision. In case of a continued herring recruitment failure, the profitability of most fleets targeting herring decreased but none of the fleets had to disinvest. Declines in fish prices (16% for frozen mackerel and herring, 81% for fresh herring, and 105% for fresh mackerel on average) and increases in fuel prices (17% on average) forced the United Kingdom, Icelandic, and large-scale (>40 m) Irish fleets to reduce their number of vessels by up to 40%.

Blue Growth has become one of the key topics of ocean management. It is defined as a holistic framework for an environmentally friendly and socio-economically sustainable development of ocean-related activities with a special emphasis on technological innovation. Capture fisheries are widely considered to have no substantial growth potential and consequently are not subject to the European Union’s Blue Growth strategy. In our review, we, however, argue that capture fisheries should play an essential role in national Blue Growth strategies. We identified two interconnected management strategies to foster Blue Growth in fisheries, a) the implementation of Community Development Quota (CDQ) systems and b) the support of small-scale fisheries (SSF). They hold the potential to benefit fishery-dependent coastal communities and therefore counteract consolidations in the fishing sector. Additionally, they provide the possibility to improve quota access for small-scale fishermen. Besides having better access to quota, the future of SSF depends on sources of public funding for technical improvement and innovation as well as increased representation in the management. In this perspective, we present different cases that successfully implemented CDQs (the Alaska pollock fishery) or have considerable potential to implement CDQ programs or improve their current approaches (United Kingdom, Ireland, and Iceland). We further discuss examples for successful management strategies to support SSF directly. If these aspects are considered in a Blue Growth strategy, the survival of fishery-dependent communities could be assured, and SSF could develop from predominantly part-time or subsistence fisheries to a full-time occupation. By those means, they would be part of a fostering Blue Economy and strengthen environmentally friendly and socio-economically sustainable fishing practices in Europe.