This meeting, planned as part of the Second CLIOTOP Open Science Symposium and to be held in conjunction with a meeting of the WMO climate and fisheries task team, will bring together climate and fisheries scientists investigating the impacts of climate variability and change on the Worlds’ living oceanic resources and the people who depend on them.
Through the concerted efforts of FAO, GLOBEC and IMBER, PICES, ICES, SPC and the other agencies comprising the Global Partnership for Climate Change, Fisheries and Aquaculture (PaCFA), awareness is growing about the vital role of fisheries and aquaculture to economic development, food security and livelihoods, and the possible effects of over-exploitation and climate change on these benefits. Fisheries play a crucial role for food security and income generation – fish contributes to the nutrition of 3 billion people and over 500 million people in developing countries depend on fisheries for their livelihoods. Fisheries production is closely linked to climate variability, and is likely to be affected further by climate change. The effects of projected increases in water temperatures and changes in ocean circulation, acidity and salinity, are expected to be particularly important.
The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Commission for Agricultural Meteorology (CAgM) and the Joint WMO/IOC Technical Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology (JCOMM) are also committed to assisting future sustainable management of fisheries by improving access to and use of weather and climate data and products relevant to fisheries management. A major conclusion from the ICES/PICES/FAO Symposium on Climate Change Effects on Fish and Fisheries: Forecasting Impacts, Assessing Ecosystem Responses and Evaluating Management Strategies in Sendai, Japan, in 2010 was that new commitments to truly interdisciplinary studies – from climate-to-fish-to-fisheries – need to be forged. Such endeavours are fostered under the CLIOTOP umbrella through a range of scientific projects around the world.
The WMO-led International Workshop on Climate and Oceanic Fisheries held in the Cook Islands in 2011 was organised to contribute to this process. The workshop focused on the tropical Pacific Ocean, because many of the Pacific Island countries and territories (PICTs) depend heavily on oceanic fisheries and need to rely on the assistance of interdisciplinary teams to plan the sustainable use of their fisheries resources.
CLIOTOP is a ten year programme implemented as a GLOBEC regional programme in 2004, now operating under the umbrella of IMBER (http://www.imber.info/index.php/Science/Regional-Programmes/CLIOTOP). CLIOTOP is devoted to the study of oceanic top predators. The general objective of CLIOTOP is to organise a large-scale worldwide comparative effort aimed at identifying the impact of both climate variability (at various scales) and fishing on the structure and function of open ocean pelagic ecosystems and their top predator species by elucidating the key processes involved in open ocean ecosystem functioning. The 1st CLIOTOP symposium, held in La Paz, Mexico, 2007, attracted some 150 participants, and resulted in a special issue of Progress in Oceanography.
Against this background, a Climate and Fisheries workshop will be held as part of the 2nd CLIOTOP Open Science Symposium in Noumea, New Caledonia, 11-15 February 2013. The objectives of this workshop would be:
To review the current data collection coordinated by JCOMM on the marine atmosphere and upper ocean, to assess how these data meet the current needs of the sustainable management in fisheries, and, as appropriate, encourage and assist fisheries vessels to make and report relevant marine meteorological and ocean observations to the WMO system;
To review the effects of climate and climate variability on seasonal to decadal time scales on fisheries;
To review the current climate change impacts and evaluate the impact of future climate change on fisheries;
To review the effects of agricultural practices on coastal fisheries;
To identify risk assessment or management evaluation tools that incorporate climate variability in order to improve the sustainable management of fisheries;
To use climate products and services, as well as those climate risk technologies to developed sustainable oceanic fisheries;
To prepare a concrete plan of action to develop and implement identified management tools and climate product and service applications;
For the different agencies sponsoring this workshop to engage in the transfer of production and traditional technologies, in particular to developing countries as discussed under WSSD Plan of Implementation, Part 107.
To receive updates from scientists on projects that align with working group objectives;
To progress CLIOTOP overarching goals.
An initial committee has been proposed comprising:
Dr Jim Salinger – Griffith University, QLD, WMO Joint Task Team Chair
Dr Jaci Brown - CSIRO Hobart CSIRO Tuna workshop Dr Karen Evans - CSIRO Hobart & CLIOTOP co-chair
Dr Alistair Hobday - CSIRO Hobart & CLIOTOP working group chair
Dr Johann Bell – Secretariat of the Pacific Community , Noumea
Dr Christophe Menke - IRD, Noumea
Dr Peter Dexter - JCOMM Management Committee
WMO Secretariat - Bob Stefanski (CAgM) and Boram Lee (JCOMM)
A scientific committee for the 2nd CLIOTOP symposium will oversee the selection of abstracts and session planning, and report to the above steering committee. This group will be comprised of the CLIOTOP scientific committee and the working group chairs. Some 150 scientists from around the world would be expected to attend the open science meeting.