I'm always stoked when Pacific Community-SPC chooses one of my pictures to cover any of their publications. My favourite is the Fisheries Bulletin and the latest edition includes a piece I co-wrote with Steven Hare, "Raising awareness of climate change by learning its language perspectives from a participant and an organiser".
This article concerns the Pacific Climate Awareness Pacific Climate Awareness Workshop (CLAW) (CLAW), I have been blogging about recently. Steven, who was one of the key organizers, approached me to write something. I didn’t see any point in being technical about it, but I decided to dive into the more “philosophical” aspect of it and dwell on how I felt about learning and/or conforming to what I know about the impact of climate change in fisheries.
It may not be the usual technical approach to my writing, but I think climate change is a human tragedy, not just a human-driven event…
In any case, here is the full article, and below my contribution
As a participant in many meetings, it would be an understatement to say it was one of the most sobering (and sometimes soul-crushing) workshops I have attended.
The workshop’s premise is very sound: climate change impacts, sea level rise, and temperature are affecting Pacific islands in terms of their existence in the long-term, and economic viability in the medium-term, as climate change affects tuna distribution and abundance.
Much has been discussed over a long time so far. Yet, we are facing an increasing scope of research from climate science that needs to come into fisheries science. This sometimes uses similar terminology with different meanings, which is already confusing for Anglophones and even more so for those who have English as their second, third, or fourth language, as is the case for most people in the Pacific. Hence, this workshop responded to the need to standardise language and concepts while providing the latest information and research on climate change, fisheries, and their interactions, and it did a splendid job at that.
In 1949, the environmental philosopher Aldo Leopold wrote: ”One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” He wasn’t referring to climate change at the time but rather to the importance of preserving natural ecosystems and our ethical responsibility to care for them. If nature does not flourish, neither will we, seems to have been his message … that obviously hasn’t been heard.
Most of my work is operational, centred on increasing reporting accuracy, diminishing the impacts of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, and expanding the understanding of fishing fleet logistics and dynamics. These efforts all contribute to the bigger picture of better fisheries management. However, many people scorn those who do this type of work for not being good enough or fast enough, for being political and industry puppets, and so on.
Most of the criticism comes from well-intentioned folks who are very fast at pointing fingers. Still, they may not know how technical the issues can get, mainly when adding other elements around subsidies, social responsibility, and the economic vulnerability of the nations that own the fish against the distant water fishing nations (DWFN) that catch most of the fish.
Yet, people keep pointing fingers at these issues while seemingly forgetting that climate change is a topic we all need to have a much more significant interest in and impact on.
The key learning from the four days is the scope of climate change in fisheries and how overwhelming it is in all aspects … from the growth of individual fish to the macro-oceanic patterns, from variations in seawater chemistry to the literal survival of coastal nations, from adjusting the stock assessment models to pan-Pacific fisheries management.
While we should continue focusing on the operational aspects, we urgently need to address these “new” and ongoing climate change-related variabilities and issues. We need to start thinking outside the box and develop new approaches that look at all the aspects, identify weak points, and try to respond to them. We also need to evaluate what happens within the intermediate periods, which has not been tested, as we tend to focus only on extreme scenarios.
Yet, in comparison, whatever we do right or wrong in fisheries has very little impact on its future if we don’t reduce emissions as a starting point.
A question I often ask myself when thinking about this is how to stay productive in the face of climate change. Pessimism (throwing my hands in the air and saying, “we are doomed!”) is paralysing, and so, for that matter, can optimism (why worry when it will all be okay in the end?). How, then, should I think and act around this?
I personally try to adhere to the philosophical perspective of “meliorism” which is defined as the “doctrine that the world, or society, may be improved and suffering alleviated through rightly directed human effort”, and comes from the Latin “melior”, meaning “better”.
So, rather than wallowing in “a world of wounds,” the “meliorist” in me, likes to believe in the potential for gradual, incremental improvements through human effort. Even if reality and the actions (or, better said, inactions) of most governments today are discouraging, what other options do I have?
A phrase by the public intellectual Noam Chomsky has guided me over the years: “We have two choices: ‘to abandon hope and ensure that the worst will happen’ or ‘to make use of the opportunities that exist and contribute to a better world’. It is not a very difficult choice.”
The climate change studies, and the gloomy figures presented in CLAW can be discouraging. Yet, they need to be interpreted positively: Reducing warming by any amount will move us up the scale and produce a lesser impact on fisheries, so people like me can work better on fisheries monitoring, IUU, etc., and ultimately contribute to better fisheries management.