The International Marine Climate Change CentrePartnerships
UK Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership (MCCIP)
The United Kingdom Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership (MCCIP) brings together scientists, government, its agencies and NGOs, to provide co-ordinated guidance on climate change impacts and adaptation. Cefas hosts the MCCIP Secretariat and Cefas scientists also contribute their expertise to MCCIP outputs including scientific review papers and report cards.
International Council for the Exploration of the Seas
We work with ICES through various programmes exploring climate change impacts on fishery resources and wider impacts on the marine environment across the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans. We have been involved with the production of the ocean climate reports, the Strategic Initiative on Climate Change Effects in Marine Ecosystems (SICCME), and many Cefas scientists are involved in ICES expert working groups.
Commonwealth Marine Economics Programme
The CME programme between 2016-2022 was led by the UK Government and aimed to support Commonwealth Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in developing their marine economies in a sustainable, resilient, and integrated way. We worked in countries including Vanuatu, Fiji, Belize and Grenada to investigate how climate change is affecting not just the marine environment but also their livelihood, and to find ways to help build resilience to future impacts.
The UK Government is a member of OSPAR, which is the mechanism by which 15 Governments and the EU cooperate to protect the marine environment of the North-East Atlantic. We are working with OSPAR by providing climate change expertise; for example we were lead contributors to the 2017 Intermediate Assessment section on Climate Change and Ocean Acidification.
UK Climate Change Risk Assessment
The UK Government is required under the 2008 Climate Change Act to publish a UK-wide Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) every five years. The Act stipulates that the Government must assess ‘the risks for the United Kingdom from the current and predicted impacts of climate change’. As part of this we have contributed expertise to highlight the risks of climate change to marine ecosystems and marine assets within both CCRAs, as well as producing a report on the Economics of Climate Resilience for wild fish stocks.
We work in partnership with the UK Met Office through many collaborative projects. This includes research to utilise their climate projections to model future fish distributions under climate scenarios, and working together under the National Partnership for Ocean Prediction. We have also contributed to generating the UK 2018 climate projections (UKCP18).