A new report shows climate change is rarely factored into management decisions made for fisheries in Atlantic Canada and the eastern Arctic.
Daniel Boyce, a research associate with the Ocean Frontier Institute at Dalhousie University in Halifax, authored the report released Wednesday by Oceans North, a national non-profit focused on marine conservation.
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His report describes oceans fed by melting Arctic sea ice whose warming, increasingly acidic waters are driving disease transmission among fish and forcing species to seek cooler temperatures deeper beneath the surface.
In an interview Monday, Boyce said he was surprised to see how infrequently climate change considerations played a role in management decisions made by the federal Fisheries Department.
Boyce analyzed two decades of department research documents used to inform management decisions and found that climate change came up in only 11 per cent of the papers.
He says the situation underscores a need for the Fisheries Department to take a wider approach to species management that looks at the entire ecosystem in which the fish lives.