WorldFish Center and climate change

Climate change has moved to front and center of the world's environmental agenda, and rightly so. Fisheries appear to be near the center of the impending storm, so I would like to update you on how we are helping nations deal with this threat.  

A major new study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC Fourth Assessment) concludes that:

• In the low latitudes of the tropics, many wet areas will get wetter and dry areas, drier, aggravating drought and flood tendencies 
• Weather events will become more extreme, creating more variability in water supplies that drive agricultural and hydrological systems
• Rising water temperatures may reduce the upwelling of food supplies that fish in the upper layers depend on, and increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase the acidity of water bodies, adversely affecting shellfish and coral reefs
• Coastal areas and islands will be particularly hard-hit by the combination of rising sea levels and more intensive oceanic storms such as typhoons and hurricanes

While fisheries will be severely impacted by many of these changes, they can contribute solutions as well. Flooded areas no longer suitable for crops can be used to cultivate fish, through research that develops adaptive technologies and management systems. Reservoirs and ponds dug to capture and store water in order to moderate the swings between drought and flood, can be simultaneously used for fish farming. Waste nutrients and water from such reservoirs can help sustain crops during periods of drought increasing the resilience of the farming system. Fish provide nutritious food to complement and compensate for more variable supplies of grains and meat caused by the unpredictable climate.

Impacts on people

A recent study on the vulnerability of national economies and food systems to climate impacts on fisheries has revealed that African countries are the most vulnerable to the likely impacts of climate change on fisheries, even though over 80 percent of the world's fishers and the world's fishing is concentrated mostly in Asia and Latin America. What makes African fisheries so vulnerable? The analysis suggests that semi-arid countries with significant coastal or inland fisheries have high exposure to future increases in temperature (and linked changes in precipitation, hydrology and coastal current systems), high catches, exports and high nutritional dependence on fish for protein, and low capacity to adapt to change due to their comparatively small or weak economies and low human development indices. These countries include Angola, Congo, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone. Fisheries provide employment for up to ten million people in Africa and provide a vital source of protein to 200 million people. Protein may be particularly limited in these countries resulting in high dependency on wild caught fish and bush meat. Other vulnerable nations include Rift Valley countries such as Malawi, Mozambique and Uganda and Asian river dependent fishery nations including Bangladesh, Cambodia and Pakistan.

Understanding vulnerability and making informed decisions

The WorldFish Center will play a vital role by helping identify and focus the best of global science to assist developing countries in understanding and tackling the threats that lie before them. This work will generate crucial outputs such as vulnerability maps, models, indicators, early-warning tools, and scientific knowledge to inform changes in policies, governance and institutions, increasing adaptive capacity, resilience, preparedness, and coping ability.

WorldFish has already developed important knowledge and information databases and tools that contribute to the task. For example, FishBase is the world's most comprehensive and authoritative database on fish, describing 28,000 species; evidence of its usefulness in identification and better understanding fish and their habitats is that it receives more than 30 million website hits per month. ReefBase documents 10,000 reefs in 40 countries, giving researchers, conservationists and resource managers a powerful tool for monitoring change and making management choices concerning coral reefs. ReefBase helped researchers assess the effects of the Asian tsunami on coastal fisheries and communities.

The BayFish model is a set of decision support tools that are helping guide basin-wide decisions about water and land use options in Cambodia's Tonle Sap Lake zone, the most intensively fished lake in the world. BayFish forecasts the impacts of land and water management dynamics (e.g. the floods that may be triggered by climate change) on fish production, helping managers to optimize the uses of inland aquatic resources. Its use is now spreading across the Mekong River system in Cambodia and Vietnam, a region expected to be hard-hit by climate change.

A related software tool called FiRST (for Fisheries Resource Information System and Tool) enables researchers to analyze fish abundance and diversity in South and Southeast Asian waters. FiRST analyzes 80 years of trawl catch data (TrawlBase) reflecting over 21,000 species caught in 20,000 locations across South and Southeast Asia. This data, assembled in partnership with Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, and Brunei, has helped the region document fish species declines in several over-fished coastal areas. It will be extremely valuable in monitoring fish population changes associated with climate change.

Governance and institution-building

Governance bodies and institutions will need to increase their capacity to help their people adapt to climate change. WorldFish provides a range of support mechanisms to strengthen national and regional capacities. The Asian tsunami may unfortunately be an indicator of the type of mega-disasters that lie ahead. WorldFish developed a Sustainable Coastal Livelihoods Framework that helps affected partners take an integrated, multi-sectoral view of rehabilitation. The Framework engages those affected in developing new livelihood options to replace those that were rendered untenable by the destruction. While developed to serve tsunami rehabilitation, it has proven effective in a wide range of rehabilitation situations, including post oil-spill and post-typhoon recovery, and should be effective in responding to climate change-induced disasters as well.

The AsiaFish model is helping policy makers, managers and researchers in nine countries to guide their strategies for sustaining and increasing supplies of freshwater fish under varying scenarios, such as those likely to be imposed by climate change.

In addition to national partners, WorldFish works closely with major economic and governance bodies at regional and continental levels. WorldFish advises the ASEAN economic community on fisheries issues, and has established vigorous partnerships with the African Union, NEPAD and FARA in Africa. The Center's catalytic Fish-for-All initiative has catalyzed greater global visibility on fisheries issues, and this will ensure high-level attention to climate change-related fisheries needs and opportunities in the coming years.

Capturing new opportunities

Although many of the consequences of climate change will be negative, WorldFish can help communities identify and take advantage of positive opportunities that arise. Because of their short generation time and large multiplication rate, fish can be quickly and efficiently bred to suit new conditions. For example, new breeds and species of fish adapted to warm and saline/brackish aquaculture systems could substitute for coastal fisheries that are lost to climate change, or degraded by saline water intrusion. WorldFish pioneered the modern science of tropical food fish breeding, creating larger and hardier strains of tilapia that are now used in thirteen countries.

Increased flooding may expand the number of seasonal ditches and pools available for cultivating fish. WorldFish will apply the knowledge gained as it helped the rural poor in Bangladesh utilize a million such water bodies for fish farming, an achievement that earned the World Food Prize in 2005. This experience will have wider applicability as coastal-plain flood zones expand around the world with rising sea levels.

Integrated aquaculture-agriculture (IAA) systems will aid coastal fisherfolk who lose their marine-based livelihoods as a result of climate change, turning coastal flooded areas from disaster into opportunity. Inland agriculturalists as well can apply it to improve their water management and total-farm productivity. We've helped thousands in Asia and Africa adopt IAA to local conditions, using inexpensive local resources such as crop residues, tree leaves, and household food wastes to feed the fish, and recycling nutrient-rich pond sediments to feed their crops. Farmer to farmer dissemination of these practices has been high due the simplicity and high impact of these systems. IAA improves the resilience of farming systems and could make a significant contribution to the reality of a green revolution for millions of small farmers.

In summary

The IPPC tells us that climate change is unavoidable over the next century. It is poised to strike at the heart of the regions, ecosystems and people that are the focus of WorldFish's concern. Yet the recent Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change states that "For fisheries, information on the likely impacts of climate change is very limited."

The world community must therefore step up its efforts and investments to fill these critical knowledge gaps, making fisheries resilient and productive despite climate change. WorldFish and partners have shown that much can be done, and will remain at the forefront of efforts to meet this unprecedented challenge.