Diversification spins a heatwave safety net for fisheries
Malin L. Pinsky
PNAS January 19, 2021 118 (3) e2024412118
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Figure: The ecological and societal impacts of future heatwaves depend not only on responses to each single event but also on long-term adaptation to climate change. In this conceptual figure, gray represents temperature through time with two heatwaves shown (early on the left and later on the right). If ecosystems, human institutions, and economic systems remain structured for the average climate of the past (flat magenta line), heatwaves in the future will have even more drastic impacts than are experienced now (magenta arrow). If ecosystems and societies adapt to new average conditions (yellow line), impacts will be similar to today (yellow arrow). Reality is likely to be somewhere in between (blue line and arrow).
Both stock markets and ecosystems experience shocks. Some shocks spark dramatic recessions or ecological collapse; others are just small bumps in the road of history. Understanding why some systems are fragile and others resilient to shocks is a major question across research fields, from economics to engineering, ecology to climate science (1). In PNAS, Fisher et al. (2) leverage a natural experiment involving crabs, fishing communities, and an extreme climate event to provide insight. The findings provide lessons for adaptation to climate change and an elegant validation of predictions from network theory. A key finding is that the least vulnerable systems are those that are more connected, are more modular, and rely on a larger set of resources.
Despite the relatively steady global increase in temperatures, most ecological and social impacts occur during extreme climate events like storms, floods, and heatwaves that push ecological and social systems beyond their typical tolerances (3). Unfortunately, heatwaves in the ocean have already become 20-fold more frequent as a result of anthropogenic climate change (4). Because fisheries directly harvest wild animals, they are tightly coupled to oceanographic and biological conditions. This fact makes disruptions from extreme events particularly clear in fisheries.
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