This week’s catastrophic ecological news is that oceans are warming 40% faster than we thought. (For now, we won’t go too far into the related catastrophic news that all the US scientific agency shutdowns mean we will be more in the dark than necessary about such ecosystem changes, but as pointed out by Science, Nature, and others, it is depressing in ex-ante theory, and in in-media-res fact.)

As the oceans warm, ecosystems respond and habitat for harvested species may shift. This is just one of many influences on species productivity that should go into definitions of sustainable fisheries but generally don’t. We examine the issue more closely in our new publication discussing the MSC certification of a commercially harvested invasive species (close readers of this blog may rightfully suspect we are focusing on crabs in the Barents Sea).

You can read the article free here:

Kourantidou, M. & B. Kaiser (2019) Sustainable seafood certifications are inadequate to challenges of ecosystem change, ICES Journal of Marine Science fsy198.