Climate Readiness: the Future of U.S. Fisheries

Climate Readiness: the Future of U.S. Fisheries

0:00:01.5 John Sheehan: Supporting healthy, sustainable seafood and a robust seafood industry is a major priority for NOAA Fisheries. And the agency recently codified that support in the form of a new National Seafood Strategy. It's a comprehensive vision that identifies what the agency can do to help increase the resiliency and competitiveness of the seafood sector, especially in the face of climate change.

0:00:24.8 Janet Coit: Our workforce at NOAA is truly passionate and smart and committed to advancing science and healthy ecosystems. I am very proud to represent and lead our nation's robust and dynamic fisheries management agency.

0:00:38.9 JS: This is Dive In with NOAA Fisheries. I'm John Sheehan, and we just heard Janet Coit, the assistant administrator of NOAA Fisheries speaking at a conference earlier this year. She was in front of an audience made up of people from across the seafood community, everyone from small boat fishers and shellfish farmers to international retailers and NGO representatives, in other words, the people for whom this strategy was created. Here's some more of Janet's remarks.

0:01:07.8 JC: The National Seafood Strategy underscores NOAA's strong commitment to seafood sector resilience and aligns with the Biden/Harris administration goals for economic recovery, environmental sustainability, and climate resilience. And again, this is about food. So NOAA's strategy is intended to see what we can do, what we can uniquely do, and what we can do with all of you as partners to increase the resiliency and the competitiveness of US seafood. And I just wanna say a few more words about climate change. It is interwoven throughout this strategy. We've got to be smart. Our chief scientist says, this is not my grandfather's ocean. You know, we're seeing the ecosystem changes and we need to be very, very smart about understanding what's going on so that we can continue to sustainably manage and we can change our governance and our management structures as the ecosystem changes.

0:02:01.7 JS: The occasion for Janet's comments about the new national strategy was a panel discussion about climate readiness, what it means to be climate ready, how the agency is thinking about and planning for a changing climate, and how the agency is responding. Janet was joined by some of NOAA Fishery's leadership, Dr. Jon Hare, the director of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, and Mike Pentony, the administrator of The Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, and Dr. Rick Spinrad, the head of NOAA, illustrating again the importance of US seafood to the agency as a whole. Their discussion presented a great opportunity to hear from leadership and policymakers in a sort of rare gathering, but rather than just play back the tape, I thought it could be interesting to hear their comments interspersed with the thoughts and concerns of some of those members of the community. You see, I was at that conference too, and as one does at a seafood conference, I had many conversations about the industry, people's experiences, their concerns about an uncertain future and what they would like to hear addressed. Here's a few of them.

0:03:08.8 Call Nichols: Yeah, my name's Call Nichols. I'm the West Coast lead for Blue Trace; it's a small technology startup based out of Maine. And we develop tools to help seafood producers and dealers with compliance and traceability. As we see around the country, we're seeing unprecedented, you know, whether it's harmful algal blooms or hurricanes, it affects all the way up the supply chain, from us to chefs. Going forward kind of on a larger scale, I think that the big thing is making sure we're prepared for an uncertain future, you know, looking forward and making sure that our regulators are aware of what possible threats might come up and equip to to deal with them.

0:03:53.9 Corey Sullivan: My name's Corey Sullivan. I'm an ocean engineer and project coordinator with Innovasea, ocean engineer primarily designing pens and mooring structures that go in the water. Personally I'm seeing it, just the more volatility in weather patterns. For us in particular, monitoring the ocean is a big one, whether it's using climate models or deploying sensors and having those in real time so that as stuff starts to develop, whether it's large waves offshore, you can react to that and it's that piece of it that is definitely key.

0:04:22.0 Bill Doyle: My name is Bill Doyle and I am a oyster farmer in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

0:04:26.8 Connor Doyle: My name is Connor Doyle. I work for Plymouth Rock Oysters as an oyster farmer and dealer in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

0:04:35.5 BD: I would say the first thing that's impacted us the most has been the intensity of the storms that we see now. They do much more damage. And the other part of it would be the biofouling that we're experiencing.

0:04:49.0 JS: And, "What is biofouling?" you ask. Well, you might've heard of this kind by its more common name.

0:04:56.2 CD: Marine vomit. It's a type of tuna kit. It is an orange gooey glue-like sponge-like substance that can seal the oyster bags into the cage so that they have to be cut out.

0:05:09.7 BD: We've had to retool all the equipment that we use. The cost, huge.

0:05:15.8 CD: The marine vomit started in the south and it's, you know, it's just kind of moving up the coast. So it would be nice to know how Virginia dealt with it. And that type of information sharing between states and localities would, I think, be extremely helpful.

0:05:32.5 JS: So what I heard was an appeal for predictability or more simply for information for data on conditions on what's happening, where and when and how to deal with it. Here's Dr. Spinrad first.

0:05:43.7 Dr. Rick Spinrad: A few years ago, we put together a number of scientific strategies. So we've already looked at how might we use something like a Saildrone capability to complement our sea-going fishery surveys, the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to deal with what often are very sparse data, can we use some of these AI ML techniques? So those are a few of the general areas. I'd throw remote sensing in there too. You know, the interesting thing is we're now looking at next generation of our satellites having even more higher resolution spectrally and spatially for ocean color and to be able to do that in a very nearshore environment.

0:06:24.9 DS: So these general areas are where you're gonna see investments being made, and of course the predictive capabilities. The two words that I really like in our wording about [0:06:35.1] ____ climate irradiation are the words prosper and benefit. If we really do our job and understand what changes are gonna come down the pike, we can position ourselves to prosper and benefit. And that means everything from understanding what changes we're gonna see in distributions of key species to ensuring that our coasts are resilient in addition to understanding what are the dynamics of weather conditions that we're gonna face, and also where are we gonna find the fish and how are we gonna build aquaculture capabilities that accommodate not current conditions, but future conditions. And so it's really a strongly science-based but regulatory adaptive concept in which we have the information and knowledge to make key decisions about impacts of climate change.

0:07:23.0 JS: And here's John Hare.

0:07:26.3 Dr. John Hare: For me, climate ready fisheries means fisheries where we're able to look back in the past and understand the effect of climate change on fish distribution and fish productivity. We have a new tool, DisMAP, which does that at the national scale. Climate-Ready Fisheries also looks forward, projects what will happen to our fisheries in the future. We have an initiative currently the Climate Ecosystems and Fisheries Initiative, which plans to do just that, working in a one NOAA framework, so working with the Ocean Service and OAR, the research arm of NOAA to develop those climate projections and then use those climate projections to link fisheries projection so we can also think about what our fisheries are gonna be in the future, and then help use that information for resiliency and that help the industry adapt to a climate future.

0:08:19.9 JS: And finally, here's Mike Pentony.

0:08:21.2 Mike Pentony: Scenario planning is in our fisheries world, it's a relatively new concept, but it's been used elsewhere as a decision making tool, it's a technique where managers can think beyond sort of the issue and problem of the day and try to look ahead as to where we might end up in 20 or 30 years without trying to predict the specific future, but acknowledge that there's a lot of uncertainty around climate change and the effect it's gonna have on our oceans and our fisheries. And it could go a couple of different ways depending on how things play out. So with scenario planning, we use this technique where we envision different plausible scenarios, different plausible future states, and we then think about, okay, if we were to find ourself in one of those plausible future states, what would we wish we had done to best position ourselves to adapt and respond? And then we look for commonalities around the different plausible future states for what we would call sort of the no regrets actions, things that we can do now that will best position us to respond to climate change no matter where we end up, which of those plausible future states.

0:09:31.5 JS: In addition to more technology and tools and more access to information, several people that I talked to expressed a pretty relatable desire for government to ease some of its regulatory hurdles as a way of supporting possibly overburdened fishermen.

0:09:47.2 Jared Auerbach: My name's Jared Auerbach, I'm the founder and CEO of Red's Best. We provide services to commercial fishermen. Our main concern or what worries me as a young guy heavily invested in the seafood industry is just making sure that our regulators are paying attention to what's happening in the, in our changing oceans. And it's unreasonable to expect the same mix of fish species to be in the same area that they were 30 years ago. That's never gonna work, no matter what limits we set. We need to have access to shore-side infrastructure. We need to support the next generation of commercial fishermen and empower them.

0:10:26.1 Jessie Baines: I'm Jessie Baines, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Atlantic Sea Farms. We are a women-run mission-driven, seaweed aquaculture company based in Maine. We have some really strict regulations in Maine as to how we can use our waters, for good reason, that's really important. But what's challenging is that we have a community of people who wanna become sea farmers, but it's taking them up to two years to get their leases approved, not because they're bad leases, they're great leases, but because there just isn't enough support at the government level to move that paperwork forward.

0:11:01.8 JS: And here's Mike Pentony and John Hare speaking a little to this issue of regulations that aren't necessarily serving people's needs in a context of changing climate.

0:11:10.7 MP: Science is obviously critical and it's the root of everything we do. But you look at some of the management structures that we have in place that constrain our ability to be responsive and adaptive. Black sea bass is a great example. We moved, you know, we, the collective we, the Fishery Management Councils, the agency, to a moratorium permit system 30 years ago. So those permits were based on the fishery that existed at the time, and it reflected the fishery that existed prior to that because of the qualification criteria. And so we have permits that are effectively locked in place to a fishery as it existed decades ago. And as the stock expands, one of the challenges we have is how do we provide access to the fishing industry, the fishing communities that now have an abundance of resource available to them without detriment to the fishing communities and the fishing vessels and industry that still relies on that product, still relies on black sea bass as it always has off the coast of New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina.

0:12:25.2 DH: And I think there are multiple examples. I think longfin squid is another one. In 2012 there was a heat wave in the, in sort of the northeast, it was on the news. And longfin squid was starting to be caught in the Gulf of Maine. Similar issue that Mike talked about, the permit structure landing, the processing facilities are all set up for a fishery which happens further south. Fast forward to the past three years have been almost as warm as that 2012 heat wave. But we don't call it a 2020 heat wave and a 2021 heat wave and a 2022 heat wave. It's now just become part of the normal conditions that we're working in. So that's gonna continue. Longfin squid are gonna continue to either expand or shift northward, which is gonna create opportunity in the Gulf of Maine. But we're gonna run into many of the same challenges that Mike described for black sea bass in terms of access and processing facilities. And then the squid still being important in the southern portions of this range.

0:13:29.0 JS: Another topic on the minds of some folks that I spoke with and certainly on the minds of NOAA Fishery's leadership, was equity, because the effects of climate change aren't felt equally and in many cases hit vulnerable populations harder.

0:13:44.5 Hannah Heimbuch: My name is Hannah Heimbuch. I am a commercial fisherman in Alaska. I live and fish out of Kodiak. My partner and I have a set net operation on the south end of Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. So we do commercial fishing there and a great deal of subsistence harvesting as well. One of the things that can be lacking is a really fundamental understanding of how climate change and fisheries management impacts communities kinda beyond an economic level, but on a real like community wellness level. Having capacity within NOAA fisheries to acknowledge study and then report on those community impacts from a social sciences standpoint, that's one thing I think that would be really helpful to help us respond more holistically to some of these challenges in the ecosystem.

0:14:25.9 JS: Here's Janet Coit again and Jon Hare speaking about bringing a social science perspective to the agency's work.

0:14:32.4 JC: One of the things I just mentioned was that we've been concerned that we maybe don't have enough social scientists who are taking a look at the interaction between the decisions that we're confronted with and the impact on coastal communities. So one of the areas that we're opening up an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking is looking at some of the national standard guidelines and looking at things like the imperative that we support coastal communities or that we don't discriminate among fisheries and think about how that guidance, which is also outdated, fits in with the challenges that we have now. And at least one area that's been highlighted with our equity strategy is that we need to be working with our social scientists both for acceptance and to have better policy making.

0:15:19.8 DH: I'm proud to say that Northeast Fishery Science Center has one of the greatest concentrations of social scientists, marine social scientists in the country. In 2014, 2015, completed a social climate vulnerability assessment, which looked linking sort of the vulnerability to fish populations and then looking at vulnerability of the communities relative to sort of the infrastructure and sea level rise and the diversity of catch being landed in a particular port. And I really think that work was groundbreaking for us because it really linked the natural sciences to the social sciences, to the management of that system and work in that vein, it just continues to expand.

0:16:08.4 JS: Finally, I wanna close with some thoughts from another member of the seafood community who I thought had some really positive ideas about the state of US seafood and who echoed a lot of the intentions behind the National Seafood Strategy.

0:16:19.2 Barton Seaver: Hey, I'm Barton Seaver. I am a chef, author, husband, father. I live on the ragged jagged, delicious coast of Maine. Changing habitats are leading to changing economics, changing species, geographies, etcetera. Here in the Gulf of Maine where the waters are warming faster than just about any other body of water on the earth, we are seeing those changes live out in real time. And so what are we going to do with our marine heritage here? So often we are in reactionary mode. What is it that we need to react to, respond to? What does the science tell us? And then how do we make decisions? So I think that there is a radical advocacy role to play here and to say that seafood is not just something that we constantly have to fix and keep track of. It's actually something that we can use to help fix the climate crisis that we are facing.

0:17:11.7 BS: And in that way, NOAA stands to really be a leader in climate conversation within the government to be really not just a stakeholder or a regulatory agency, but really the progenitor of solutions that flow out through so many different realms of our society, from public health to economic development, to food justice and security. All of these issues can be directly addressed through the development of both onshore, offshore and nearshore aquaculture. There is unsustainable seafood, there is sustainable seafood, and I think that there is a third category of restorative or regenerative seafoods. Farm-raised shellfish, clams, mussels, oysters, scallops, kelp, we know that those actually improve the quality of water, habitat and economy wherever they are grown. Oh, and by the way, they're delicious. There is so much now sustainable seafood out there. Not that there's not more work to do, but instead of shouting, "Hey people, we need to fix seafood," maybe we start shouting, "Hey people, let's use seafood to fix people and to build new economies, to build new opportunities, to build more healthful societies." And in that way, seafood is our future.

0:18:36.6 JS: Today we heard from NOAA Fishery's, assistant administrator Janet Coit, and from Dr. Rick Spinrad, the administrator of NOAA. We also heard from Dr. Jon Hare, director of the Northeast Fishery Science Center and Mike Pentony, the administrator of the Greater Atlantic Regional Office. Comments on the advanced notice of proposed rulemaking that assistant administrator Coit mentioned are being reviewed now by NOAA. Any further action on the national standards would be released in a draft form for public input. Very big thanks to the community members we heard from today, Call Nichols from Blue Trace, Corey Sullivan from Innovasea, Bill and Connor Doyle of Plymouth Rock Oysters, Jared Auerbach from Red's Best Seafood. Jessie Baines from Atlantic Sea Farms, Hannah Heimbuch, a fisherman from Alaska and Barton Seaver, a chef, seafood expert and author. Also thanks to Diversified Communications for providing the audio of NOAA Fisheries Panel on Climate Readiness. NOAA Fisheries National Seafood Strategy was released in August and you can learn all about it or read the thing yourself at fisheries.noaa.gov. I'm John Sheehan and this has been Dive In with NOAA Fisheries.