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we’ve never had to look at before.”
Add to that uncertainty the sizable
time lag that exists between scientific
understanding and its translation into
public policy, and it’s likely that the intersection of commercial fishing, environmental conservation and government
oversight is going to become increasingly
chaotic and contentious in coming years.
Writing in the journal Nature last
month, the researchers from the University of British Columbia, whose new analysis suggests that fish and invertebrate
movements in response to warming waters have been underway since the 1970’s,
suggested the stakes were high for everyone. “This study shows that ocean warming has already affected global fisheries in
the past four decades,” they wrote, “highlighting the immediate need to develop
adaptation plans to minimize the effect of
such warming on the economy and food
security of coastal communities, particularly in tropical regions.”
Of course, that’s easier said than done.
“It’s an immensely complicated situation,” Kritzer says. “You have climate
change overlaying everything, and it
seems to be changing the way everything
works, which means we have a lot of
problems. It’s getting harder and harder
to assess the stocks, to model them and
understand their dynamics and predict
what’s going to happen. Because those
models are based on years and years of
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experience reading fish stocks and studying them, they have been tested over a
long time and they rely on a certain set
of assumptions and conditions that now
seem to be rapidly changing. Tools that
have been fairly well established and
worked well in the past just don’t seem to
be working as well anymore.”
Until science gets a handle on things,
Runge says, that’s going to be a social,
economic and regulatory problem. “I
think we’re just going to be responding
kind of blindly to what happens.”
Down the hall from Runge’s office at
the Gulf of Maine Research Institute,
Andrew Pershing, an ocean ecosystem
modeler, has been enthus