Research Document 2019/044

Resource management under climate change: a risk-based strategy to develop climate-informed science advice

By Duplisea, DE, Roux, M-J, Hunter, KL, and Rice, J

Abstract

Climate change is currently affecting the structure and function of Canadian aquatic ecosystems. Scientific advice on sustainable exploitation of biological resources (particularly fish stocks) does not usually take into account the potential impact of climate change on achievability of either near term (tactical) or long term (strategic) goals. We present a framework for conditioning scientific advice for sustainable fisheries to climate change. This framework recognises that all management of biological resources in the Department is implicitly or explicitly a form of risk management, thus the framework attempts to effect climate change conditioning in the decision risk profile. This approach contrasts a purely causal mechanistic based approach which considers climate change as a driver with known linkages to biological dynamics and produces estimates of stock size and production including the climate signal. Although our approach can also include specific mechanistic relationships linking climate and resource dynamics, it takes the extra step of quantifying the overall incremental risk in decision making on resource exploitation owing to climate change. In fact, this approach draws attention to the climate conditioned risk statements in the science advice rather than refinement of median prediction estimates of climate conditioned production as the most appropriate place to condition overall advice to climate change. It may be possible to develop a set of climate change conditioning factors given data and process-knowledge availability for a stock combined with a measure of the climate departures from baselines over the management period and resource sensitivity to climate change. These factors could be applied to particular cases based on general decision criteria in order to develop risk equivalent advice under climate change. This approach has partial analogs to the USA and Australia where risk equivalent buffers are applied to stock advice to account for uncertainty in data knowledge and technical basis for the assessment; thus, approaches of this nature have already proven to be operational in other jurisdictions.

Research Document 2019/044 (PDF, 1,503 KB)