Publications

The confluence of climate change impacts on coastal communities includes intensifying natural hazards, decreasing abundance of and access to natural resources, and ecosystem shifts that imperil livelihoods and cultural heritage. Yet, especially in rural communities with complex, dynamic participation in commercial fisheries and marine support industries, adaptation planning continues to be elusive. To capture opportunities for climate change planning, this work reviews multiple categories of local plans for 16 communities and boroughs on the Gulf of Alaska, selected for engagement in commercial fisheries and dependence on coastal infrastructure. This analysis characterizes the components of these local plans relative to a climate change plan framework and evaluates their social resilience capacity with respect to fisheries and marine support industries. This approach reveals that local planning to support fisheries and marine support industries within comprehensive and hazard management plans is largely focused on habitat protection and often unrelated to climate change stressors, even in communities with extreme engagement in coastal industries. Further analysis highlights critical relationships between planning for fisheries and marine support industries and domains of social resilience. In the absence of political will and funds to aid communities in developing standalone climate plans, planning for climate change can and should occur within existing community planning frameworks. This research clarifies how that integration may occur within local plans and suggests pathways for ensuring that integration is successful in including necessary climate plan components that are expansive and inclusive of diverse social resilience domains.

In fishing communities, livelihoods and well-being depend on sustaining access to key fisheries through changes in natural resource management. In Alaska, the rationalization of the commercial fishery for Pacific halibut (Hippoglossus stenolepis) in 1995 led to the consolidation of the halibut fleet. The high cost of halibut catch shares have since become a crucial barrier to prospective entrants, especially small-scale operations with few options for portfolio diversification. However, quantitative approaches to understanding that barrier face an information gap: datasets on harvest and catch share ownership in fisheries lack common identifiers for individuals. We match individuals across harvest and catch share ownership data from 1991 through 2019, enabling a detailed examination of entrants and non-entrants – those who acquire or do not acquire halibut catch shares over the time series. We compare fisheries portfolios in terms of participation and earnings through duration, dissimilarity, and network analyses. Differences over time and between entrants and non-entrants emerge across analyses. For both groups, cohorts of participants shrink and real individual earnings increase over the time series. However, entrants’ cohorts have decreased further relative to historical participation, while entrants’ real earnings and fisheries portfolio compositions have diverged from those of non-entrants. Our results reveal broad differences in Alaska fisheries participants’ access to a critical fishery, underscoring the role of catch shares in shaping fishing communities’ opportunities and resilience in the face of social and environmental change.

Impacts of climate change on fisheries are intensifying, especially in northern latitudes, yet pathways to adaptation remain unclear. We analyze the vulnerabilities and adaptations of fisheries participants in discourse represented by public comments on state fisheries management in the Gulf of Alaska, where extreme climate events impact diverse and robust cultures of fisheries participation. With 18,422 comments by 5715 commenters from 2010 through 2021, we parse discourse through content analysis in a well-being framework and capture trends in principal component analysis. Climate change becomes more prominent in discourse with the impacts of extreme marine heatwaves. However, attribution and cognitive dissonance processes result in entrenchment of polarizing viewpoints between user groups on fisheries allocations and enhancements. Yet some adaptation pathways emerge that bridge fishing identities with empowered conservation. By expanding approaches to examining public discourse captured in big qualitative data, these methods and findings can help inform fisheries climate adaptation policy.