Climate Change is Putting Fisheries Around the World at Risk
The first of what will be a series of assessments of the country’s fisheries found that Northeast marine life will respond poorly to ongoing man-made climate, although some species will be resilient.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study, published Wednesday in PLOS ONE, examined 82 species in the Northeast Shelf, which ranges from Cape Hateras in North Carolina through the Gulf of Maine along the Atlantic Ocean. The study ranked the vulnerability of marine life to ongoing ocean warming, an endeavor NOAA is doing for the first time through new methodology that combines ocean conditions, the latest climate models, species characteristics, and NOAA expert analysis.
“More than half of the species which we assessed are likely to get negatively impacted by climate change,” said Jon Hare, lead author and a NOAA oceanographer, in an interview with ThinkProgress.
Dhammika Heenpella