Barriers and enablers of climate adaptation in fisheries: Insights from Northeast US fishing communities

As impacts of climate change on marine fisheries grow in frequency and magnitude, planning and implementing adaptation actions are both urgent and crucial to enable fishery participants and communities to minimise risks and benefit from potential opportunities. Exploring factors that constrain or facilitate the adaptation process in complex fisheries socio-ecological systems can enable greater insight into why certain adaptation strategies may succeed or fail and help inform adaptation planning. Using data collected from interviews and workshops in four commercial fishing communities in New England along the Northeast US coastline, we ask what barriers and enablers of climate adaptation are being experienced or perceived, and where within the fisheries socio-ecological system they are emerging. Thematic analysis identified a variety of barriers and enablers of adaptation, of which many were shared across communities, while others were unique to particular localities. Barriers included fisheries specialisation and dependency, overcapitalisation, working waterfront issues, limited access to alternative fisheries, management system responsiveness, wider community perceptions, and workforce challenges. Enablers included perceived industry and community adaptability, knowledge and learning capacity, working waterfront protections, diverse shoreside services, and fisher-led conservation efforts. Barriers and enablers therefore arose not just among fishers themselves, but emerged throughout the socio-ecological system, highlighting the importance of multi-scale influences on adaptation processes. Climate adaptation planning in fisheries contexts should extend beyond approaches that consider the resource and resource user to also account for the changes, barriers and opportunities occurring shoreside and influencing the future of the fishing community as a whole.