Interdisciplinary insights into industrial fisheries’ adaptation to climate change

Résumé

This dissertation aims to investigate whether large-scale fisheries are already responding to climate change impacts and explore their adaptation responses in order to propose informed adaptation (i.e. actions derived from this research that help adaptation planning). For that purpose, climate change impacts on the distribution of a specific fishery activity (purse seine) are analysed based on public data and using methods on spatiotemporal analysis and machine learning. Then, an empirical approach combining SES theory with the literature about social adaptation to climate change is constructed employing a range of methods from social sciences and statistical analyses. Taken together, the thesis contributes to scholarly debates about the challenges of defining large-scale fisheries as social-ecological systems; uses integrative perspectives to address adaptation to climate change and contributes to the debates about how to promote social adaptation with the prospects of achieving sustainable fisheries. The thesis answers two overarching research questions. First: How is climate change impacting tropical tuna purse seine fisheries activity in the East Atlantic Ocean, and second: How are large-scale tropical tuna fisheries, defined as SES, adapting to climate change?