Over the past year, East Coast fishery management bodies have been collaborating on a climate change scenario planning initiative designed to prepare fishing communities and fishery managers for an era of climate change. The goals of this project are to assess how climate change might affect stock distribution and availability of East Coast marine fisheries over the next 20 years and to identify the implications for fishery management and governance.

In June 2022, a group of about 75 stakeholders attended a workshop to develop an initial set of scenarios, describing several different possible futures facing East Coast fisheries out to 2042. As the next step in the scenario planning process, two Scenario Deepening webinars will be held in August 2022. These webinars will offer all interested stakeholders an opportunity to review, validate, and add details to the draft scenarios.

Webinar Details

Each 2-hour session will begin with an overview of the outputs and stories from the draft scenarios. Participants will then have an opportunity to add comments and suggestions to make the scenarios more plausible, challenging, relevant, memorable, and divergent. For each scenario, participants will be encouraged to imagine specific examples about impacts to particular species, regions, and communities. Participants only need to attend one of the two webinars.

• Tuesday, August 23, 2022, 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.: Click here to join the webinar

Once again, stakeholder involvement is key, and these webinars are open to the public. The outcome of the two webinars will be a more detailed set of scenarios that will be used as a platform for later stages of the process, looking specifically at how fishery management and governance must change to be prepared for a future of climate change.

Meeting Materials

• Draft Scenario Narratives - August 2022

• Supplemental: Scenario Creation Workshop Summary

The draft scenarios are not final or complete. Webinar participants are asked to review the draft scenarios in advance, and be ready to share ideas to strengthen and sharpen the stories. What are the important elements of these scenarios? What do they make you think about? What are they missing?

Learn More

Additional information is available on the Climate Change Scenario Planning Web Page and in the Introductory brochure.