Climate change and the common fisheries policy

This study evaluates opportunities for reducing the carbon footprint of the marine wild capture sector managed under the current Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), while maintaining the viability, sustainability and resilience of this sector in face of climate change as a stress factor acting on the European Union (EU) fishing system. This work is vital as large environmental change adds to ecosystem variability and fishing impacts on the marine ecosystems, weakening marine ecosystem productivity and ultimately impacting fishing opportunities or affecting their spatial distributions. The work takes place in the context of an increasingly changing global environment, for which there is a need to understand the energy dependence, and therefore emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) of EU fisheries. 

Within this contract, a literature review and simulation studies have been used to get a good understanding of the climate effects on fisheries and identify opportunities to reverse possible declining trends in fisheries stocks induced by ongoing large-scale climate change, including the potential risk of short-term climate-change-induced stresses on such stocks. This work benefits from insights obtained by applying fit-for-purpose state-of-the-art fisheries simulation studies to document the likely future impacts of climate change, and the performance and robustness of fishing strategies to resist stress under the current CFP management. Here, the study evaluated the preparedness of fisheries to resource, ecosystem, fishing-related infrastructure and financial/economic shocks. Included in our evaluation is how the development and use of fuel-efficient practices and low impact fishing, in coherence with environmental policies and environmental targets on reduction of CO2 emission, may further improve the sustainability of EU fisheries.