Research Document - 2002/111

Predicting the future of marine fish and fisheries off Labrador and eastern Newfoundland under scenarios of climate change.

By By Lilly, G.R., and Carscadden, J.E.

Abstract

This paper is an initial step in the process of providing predictions regarding the potential impact of climate change on the marine fish and fisheries of northeastern Canada. The exercise, which is undertaken as part of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), entails an overview of the major fisheries from Davis Strait to the northern Grand Bank, focussing on a brief history of the landings and a discussion of factors that are known or suspected to have been important in determining changes in both landings and stock status. One would like to use relationships derived from the history of changes in the physical environment and various aspects of fish biology (distribution, recruitment, growth, mortality) to predict how each species might respond to oceanographic changes that might accompany climate change, but this is difficult for several reasons. First, as with fisheries elsewhere, it is difficult to distinguish the influence of climate variability from the influences of fishing and biological interactions among species. Thus, there are few robust demonstrations of the influence of climate variability. Second, the ecosystems of the Labrador Shelf, Northeast Newfoundland Shelf and northern Grand Bank have changed so dramatically in the past few decades that any relationships seen in the past may no longer apply. Third, even if we had confidence that we could predict the response of fish stocks to specific changes in the physical oceanography, we lack at this time the downscaling that would translate the broadscale projections of climate change to specifics of regional physical oceanography. We invite critiques of our observations and tentative conclusions.

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