Publication Abstract

Effects of a changing windfield on cod stocks of the North Atlantic

R.R. Dickson and K.M. Brander

This article reviews the impacts of climatic change on six North Atlantic cod stocks during the present century-at Iceland, Greenland, Labrador, the Faroes, the Barents Sea, and the Baltic.

When landings were at their individual maxima, sometime between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s, these six cod stocks supported a total catch of around 3.5 x 10⁶ t yr^-I. By the end of the 1980s, landings had dropped to about one-third of that total, driven down in most cases by an unsustainable degree of overfishing. That the fishing pressure was unsustainable was due in part to the impacts of a changing climate, and it is the aim of this article to identify some of the ways in which these climatic impacts have taken effect. Climatic change can of course be described from any of a wide range of environmental variables. Here we emphasize the role of the windfield, because it is the nearest point at which we can offer a unifying context for the very different case studies we describe. Up to this point, we believe we can describe the essential changes in the windfield as pan-Atlantic in scale, and describable in terms of the long slow shifts of a few key indices. Beyond this point, the actual mechanisms by which these changes appear to have imposed their effects on cod stocks are surprisingly different in type and scale for each stock.

Reference:

R.R. Dickson and K.M. Brander, 1994. ICES Marine Science Symposium, 198: 271-279 . Effects of a changing windfield on cod stocks of the North Atlantic.