Fishery Friendly Climate Action Planning
The challenge:
Widespread deployment of decarbonization solutions is necessary to tackle the root causes of climate crisis. But some decarbonization solutions can have impacts on waterways, ocean ecosystems, and the food production activities that depend on these places. Some impacts may be negative, posing tradeoffs between the decarbonization benefits of certain solutions and the integrity of these ecosystems and services. Some impacts may be positive, offering co-benefits to these ecosystems and services. Without a guiding paradigm to ensure co-optimization of these two objectives, however, there is an acute risk that progress towards decarbonization will come at the expense of ocean ecosystems and the fishery-related services they provide.
Our solution:
Fishery Friendly Climate Action and its collaborators are spearheading the development of new data visualization and decision support tools that can assist planners and stakeholders in identifying the most “fishery friendly “ portfolio of climate change mitigation investments and incentives for a given jurisdiction. These tools will make it possible to co-optimize the need to achieve deep decarbonization with the need to sustain fishery ecosystems and the services they provide.
Expert elicitation pilot project [Fall 2023-Spring 2024]
Fishery Friendly Climate Action is working with Vanessa Sedore, a senior at Brown University, to test the value of expert elicitation as a method of enabling objective comparison of potential impacts to fishery-supporting ecosystems from a range of climate change mitigation measures (also known as “decarbonization solutions”). Fisheries ecosystem experts meeting certain criteria are invited to sign up to participate by January 10, 2024.
SIGN UP HERE!
The process
Each participating expert will receive a set of 10 decarbonization solutions to evaluate (out of a total of 30 decarbonization solutions of interest to the study). Each expert will score each of their assigned decarbonization solutions according to four dimensions of potential impact: impacts to abiotic components of fishery ecosystems; scale of positive impacts and negative impacts to three biotic processes in fishery ecosystems; and duration of impacts to biotic processes in fishery ecosystems.
One all experts have independently scored their decarbonization solutions along these dimensions of ecological impact, we will bring experts together in three small-group virtual workshops to reconsider (and potentially adjust) their scores by comparing their scores with the score of other experts.
Finally, we will invite three experts (one from each small group) to join us in looking across all 30 decarbonization solutions and converting expert scores into a synthesis that can inform climate action planning activities.
How will the data synthesis be used to inform planning?
Once fishery ecosystem impact scores have been assigned to all of the decarbonization solutions under consideration by a state or other jurisdiction, planners and stakeholders will be able to selectively build decarbonization pathway scenarios that prioritize and front-load the highest ranked, or most “fishery friendly” decarbonization solutions from the mix, until the desired decarbonization target (e..g, net zero by 2050) is reached. Planners typically build such scenarios by using a “decarbonization pathway model” (a kind of energy modeling tool that helps planners make informed decisions on the best way to reduce emissions while addressing interconnected social, economic, and environmental issues). Our project is the first to explicitly link fishery ecosystem impacts into decarbonization pathway modeling. While fishery impacts are one of many considerations that climate action planners must take into consideration, our hope is that these new tools will make visible the interactions between decarbonization solutions and fishery ecosystems and provide a clear and objective framework to consider these impacts in the context of climate action planning.
Rhode Island community engagement case study [2024-2025]
Rhode Island’s 2025 Climate Action Plan is one of 219 concurrent climate action planing processes kicking off across the U.S. in late 2023 as a result of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants. These plans will set in motion the next several decades of climate policy and investment, and they represent a critical moment for Americans to get involved in shaping the decarbonization trajectories of the states, territories, tribes, and cities where they live and work.
Fishery Friendly Climate Action is building an onramp for commercial fishermen to participate in Rhode Island’s 2025 Climate Action Plan through a partnership with the Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island. This project will provide training to five select members of Rhode Island’s commercial fishing community in:
State-level climate policy in Rhode Island;
Understanding decarbonization pathway modeling, how it is used to inform planning, and how to engage effectively in shaping modeling scenarios;
Understanding and communicating fishery ecosystem impacts from a range of decarbonization solutions; and
Building ally-ship with other climate-impacted constituencies in the food system and identifying decarbonization solutions that we can advance together.
The Rhode Island project is funded by a Partnership for Research Excellence in Sustainable Seafood (PRESS) grant from Rhode Island Sea Grant. The partners will recruit participants in early 2024.