Pew marine researchers issued a new paper titled “Avoiding a Crisis of Motivation for Ocean Management Under Global Environmental Change”, which points out that, even people view climate change as an intangible and overwhelming problem, they can address its impacts on the oceans, chiefly through continued investment in innovative strategies, for managing the seas and the life within them.
Led by Peter Mumby, from the University of Queensland, and Jane Lubchenco, from Oregon State University, the group reviewed evidence that climate change poses such a crisis because of how people typically respond to long-term, incremental change. The reduced investment maybe exactly a result of the fact that most humans avoid acting on what they perceive as long-range, such as climate change.
In addition, the paper, which was published in the journal Global Change Biology, considers how management strategies can account for “climate surprises”—the gaps between expectations and actual events.
For example, technology can enable simulations that allow people to see what would happen under different environmental scenarios. This means that, by including additional variables in computer models, managers can better understand the benefits of various actions they could take under changing climates.
Furthermore, through a series of case studies on climate change’s impact on marine ecosystems, the paper explores which variables might encourage or discourage further investments, and considers the possible consequences of those decisions.
For example, the authors consider management of fish stocks that are shifting their range in response to temperature changes. An economically rational response to such a shift is for people in a region that is losing fish to overexploit those declining stocks, while those in places where fish have increased might mistake migration for high productivity and overfish. But by treating the stock as a shared resource, both parties could help ensure a more sustainable outcome.
“Of the many surprises that we face with climate change, I hope that a proactive and strategic human response is among the greatest,” says Mumby. “Greater investment in ecosystem management does not mean more regulation, but smarter, more flexible approaches that better anticipate and respond to unexpected changes.”
