[ EVENTS ] Adapting and mitigating in the face of a changing climate
Climate change versus the seafood industry Iceland Responsible Fisheries
Fishery and aquaculture stakeholders and scientists from the Nordic countries met in December in Elsinore, Denmark, to address the challenges posed by climate change at a workshop organised jointly by the Nordic Marine Think Tank and ICES, with support from the Nordic Council of Ministers.
The energy used by the Icelandic processing industry has declined 85% since the 80s and will soon be entirely from renewable resources.
T
he workshop reviewed recent research and initiatives concerning the challenges of climate change for fisheries and aquaculture, and attempted to synthesise expertise, practical experiences, and lessons learned. The longer aim was to launch the Nordic Climate Change Forum for Fisheries and Aquaculture to provide a platform for the Nordic fisheries and
aquaculture sectors to exchange knowledge, ideas, and practices. The workshop was chaired by Árni M. Mathiesen, former fishery minister of Iceland. The world’s oceans are at grave risk and so are the world’s capture fisheries and aquaculture. The workshop considered climate change as two sides of the same coin: How can the fishing and aquaculture
industries adapt to the sometimescatastrophic shifts caused by climate change, and how can these industries mitigate their own contribution to the mechanisms that are causing the climate to change? Simply put then, the solutions to the challenges posed by climate change are to adapt by adjusting to current and future effects of climate change and mitigate by minimising the sectors’ carbon
footprints by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs), thus reducing the impacts of climate change.
Climate change versus the ocean Workshop presenters described various ways that progress has been made by the fishery and aquaculture sectors in reducing
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