By Anne Nelson, Lauren Wenzel, and Gabrielle Johnson (IMPACT Team)
Kudos to the examples of proactive climate management in last month’s MPA News coverage. The examples from colleagues in Hawaii, Caribbean / Gulf of Mexico, Mediterranean, and Madagascar provide important lessons to consider with your MPA team as you move through your own climate assessment, adaptation planning, and plan review. Discussing these examples with your team can be a good way to start, restart, or reevaluate your climate planning process.
Climate-related drivers of change – such as ocean warming, acidification, and deoxygenation – will alter ocean conditions and lead to changes in marine ecosystem structure and functioning, as well as the redistribution of the services that the oceans provide (see Figure 1). As a consequence, human uses that rely on these services – fisheries, aquaculture, and tourism for example – will also undergo spatial and temporal changes at multiple scales. These changes will include local increases and decreases in intensity of uses and relocation of uses. Marine spatial planning (MSP) informs the distribution of ocean uses in space and time, and it will undoubtedly be affected by climate change at all scales ranging from global to local.