Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 8
World Fisheries and Climate
Trend
Ana Laura Delgado
1,
*
and
Maria Celeste Lopez Abbate
2
Introduction
Climate oscillations have always occurred in history and natural systems
have developed a capacity to adapt, by migrating to nearby stable domains.
This ability will enable ecosystems to mitigate the impact of future changes,
however, there are two factors which will limit the ecosystem adaptability,
1) the current exacerbated rate of climate change compared to previous
natural changes, and 2) the restricted resilience of species as a result of
human pressure which has caused overfi shing, loss of biodiversity, habitat
destruction, pollution and introduction of invasive species and pathogens
(Brander 2010).
The influence of human activities upgrade the impact of climate
change over marine ecosystems, thus, recognizing the additive effect
of both sources of extrinsic variability will help reduce the uncertainty
when predicting the response of marine communities (Perry et al. 2010a).
The concept of social-ecological systems (fi rstly proposed by Berkes and
Folke 1998) can be thought of as the interplay between two subsystems:
the biophysical (including biology and climate) and the human (including
