VANCOUVER—Global fish stocks are in real danger without fast action from governments to better manage fisheries suffering from the effects of climate change, researchers and experts say.

William Cheung, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, said the way data is used to figure out safe guidelines for fisheries could quickly be rendered useless by the effects of a warming planet.

“Climate change is actually changing the baseline that fisheries management measures are working on,” Cheung said. “So it’s likely those (measures) that are working now ... they may not work in the near future.”

Nearly 850,000 metric tonnes of seafood were landed by Canadian commercial fisheries in 2016, according to a report from Fisheries and Oceans Canada. The United Nation’s latest data shows total capture for global fisheries was 93.4 million tonnes in 2014, the most recent year on record.

Cheung points to the salmon treaty between the United States and Canada as one example of an approach that has been historically effective, but may quickly become obsolete.

“Salmon is what we call a trans-boundary stock,” he said. “Many of the populations go beyond the jurisdictions of Canada. Climate change affects the distribution of these stocks and … would then have an effect on the effectiveness of this joint agreement.”

Aaron Hill, executive director of the Watershed Watch Salmon Society, said salmon stocks are particularly vulnerable to climate change, with wild variations in numbers of returning salmon recorded in recent years.

While the federal government has begun to account for factors such as climate change, Hill said in fisheries management, more needs to be done.

“The government does recognize that unpredictability requires further precaution,” he said. “They’re just not adapting quickly enough.”

A failure to adapt, he added, puts many of the world’s marine species in peril, and by extension, the fishing industry as a whole.

“When the majority of the stocks that are swimming through our waters are endangered, should we still go fishing?” Hill asked.

Peter Chandler, an oceanographer with Fisheries and Ocean Canada, said the federal government has been factoring climate change into its fisheries management plan for some time now. This means quotas for fish capture and plans for ocean and river preservation have become constantly moving targets.

“One of the most important things is to recognize just because (a plan) worked last year, or just because it worked the last 10 years, don’t get complacent,” Chandler said. “It’s so important to realize we don’t know it all. Once we start deceiving ourselves that we have a good handle on it, that’s the real danger.”

Ussif Rashid Sumaila, a professor and director of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at the UBC Fisheries Centre, said fisheries preservation is no longer a local or even national issue.

Most fish, Sumaila said, spend time both in coastal waters governed nationally, and in the deep ocean where international governance applies.

“We have boundaries for administrative convenience,” he said. “But the fish don’t know this and they don’t really care.”

For this reason, Sumaila suggested that creating international agreements to protect the high seas from overfishing by treating them as a “fish bank” would mean individual countries know their local fisheries were better protected, even in the face of a changing climate.

“Then, even if we mess up and make mistakes in country waters, at least we have (the high seas) that might be able to seed the system again,” he said. “So it’s a mechanism to really help ensure that we can continue benefiting economically from the system rather than taking it down, as it seems we are doing.”

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Sumaila pointed to last year’s moratorium on unregulated commercial fishing in the Arctic Ocean as a sign of hope that international partners can work together to protect a rapidly changing ocean as a resource.

“International will can effect meaningful change,” Sumaila said, adding he will be presenting his research on high seas fish banks to the UN in June, and felt hopeful he would find sympathetic ears.

“This is why we do this work. You pick up a little idea and then before you know, the world is actually looking at it.… It just blows my mind.”

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