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The rise in climate change-induced federal fishery disasters in the United States.

ABSTRACT: Commercial, recreational, and indigenous fisheries are critical to coastal economies and communities in the United States. For over three decades, the federal government has formally recognized the impact of fishery disasters via federal declarations. Despite these impacts, national syntheses of the dynamics, impacts, and causes of fishery disasters are lacking. We developed a nationwide Federal Fishery Disaster database using National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fishery disaster declarations and fishery revenue data. From 1989-2020, there were 71 federally approved fishery disasters (eleven are pending), which spanned every federal fisheries management region and coastal state in the country. To date, we estimate fishery disasters resulted in $2B (2019 USD) in Congressional allocations, and an additional, conservative estimate of $3.2B (2019 USD) in direct revenue loss. Despite this scale of impact, the disaster assistance process is largely ad hoc and lacks sufficient detail to properly assess allocation fairness and benefit. Nonetheless, fishery disasters increased in frequency over time, and the causes of disasters included a broad range of anthropogenic and environmental factors, with a recent shift to disasters now almost exclusively caused by extreme environmental events (e.g., marine heatwaves, hurricanes, and harmful algal blooms). Nationwide, 84.5% of fishery disasters were either partially or entirely attributed to extreme environmental events. As climate change drives higher rates of such extreme events, and as natural disaster assistance requests reach an all-time high, the federal system for fisheries disaster declaration and mitigation must evolve in order to effectively protect both fisheries sustainability and societal benefit.

SUBMITTER: Bellquist L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8071068 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Climate change will cause a range of related risks, including increases in infectious and chronic disease, intensified social and economic stresses, and more frequent extreme weather events. Vulnerable groups will be disproportionately affected due to greater exposure to climate risks and lower ability to prepare, adapt, and recover from their effects. Better understanding of the intersection of vulnerability and climate change risks is required to identify the most important drivers of future climate risks and effectively build resilience and deploy targeted adaptation efforts. Incorporating community stakeholder input, we identified and integrated available public health, social, economic, environmental, and climate data in the United States (U.S.), comprising 184 indicators, to develop a Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) composed of four baseline vulnerabilities (health, social/economic, infrastructure, and environment) and three climate change risks (health, social/economic, extreme events). We find that the vulnerability to and risks from climate change are highly heterogeneous across the U.S. at the census tract scale, and geospatially cluster into complementary areas with similar climate risks but differing baseline vulnerabilities. Our results therefore demonstrate that not only are climate change risks both broadly and variably distributed across the U.S., but also that existing disparities are often further exacerbated by climate change. The CVI thus lays a data-driven, scientific foundation for future research on the intersection of climate change risks with health and other inequalities, while also identifying health impacts of climate change as the greatest research gap. Moreover, given U.S. government initiatives surrounding climate and equity, the CVI can be instrumental in empowering communities and policymakers to better prioritize resources and target interventions, providing a template for addressing local-scale climate and environmental justice globally.

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The rise in climate change-induced federal fishery disasters in the United States.

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