Future Socio-political Scenarios for Aquatic Resources in Europe: An Operationalized Framework for Marine Fisheries Projections

Abstract

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.

Ten lessons on the resilience of the EU common fisheries policy towards climate change and fuel efficiency - A call for adaptive, flexible and well-informed fisheries management

“…For example, regulatory barriers constraining the flexibility of the fisheries to adapt to novel conditions may be removed, as long as they will not impair future opportunities, and incentives for redirecting the fisheries toward viable pathways may be deployed (e.g. Hamon et al, 2021;Woods et al, 2022). Describing this link also requires understanding the adaptive responses available to fishers, that is, whether there is the capacity to change operations or whether social, financial or regulatory barriers exist, and under what conditions they would implement this adaptive response (i.e.…”

Making spatial-temporal marine ecosystem modelling better – A perspective

“…exploring alternative paths along which the future might unfold ( Van der Heijden, 2005 ), and running models for ranges of possible futures. This allows for exploration of upper and lower bounds to assumptions regarding socio-economic pathways and climate change, thus obtaining a bandwidth of predictions for possible futures ( de Mutsert et al, 2021 ; Hamon et al, 2021 ; Lotze et al, 2019 ; Maury et al, 2017 ). Closely related is the uncertainty in making ecosystem predictions for future conditions, based on present and past conditions.…”

Scenarios of profitability of western Mediterranean demersal fisheries in an effort control regime

“…Uncertainty in the evolution of prices in the long run (e.g. beyond 2030) was explored by running the proposed management under scenarios of oil and ex-vessel fish prices produced by (Hamon, et al, 2021) We built a bioeconomic simulation model based on FLBEIA to obtain the input values of the economic variables in the optimisation model. The FLBEIA model application is described in Appendix 1.…”

“…no changes in management), S1 simulates the implementation of the official WM MAP in force for the period 2020-2024, and S2 is an alternative scenario base on the current practice in Atlantic European fisheries which follows a "harvest control rule" (HCR) set from the scientific advice provided by ICES. This management model is working well for Atlantic European fisheries(Cardinale, et al, 2017) and its validity is explored for Mediterranean fisheries.Each scenario is projected according to five possible future conditions as follows(Woltier & Kuiper, 2014) (Hamon et al 2021): CC: Current Case-All economic parameters projected into the future without taking into account any climate change effect. This means projecting all prices to their average current values, without taking into account the increase in fuel price and fish price projected by IPCC SSPs 5 .…”