Marine climate shifts can have large impacts among fishing-dependent people and communities. The well-known El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, for example, affects fisheries along the west coast of South America that account for 15% of the world's total marine catch, and appears linked to the recent failures of Alaska's Bristol Bay and Kuskokwim salmon runs. In the Atlantic, a different decadal climate cycle called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) has drawn research attention. The NAO tends to produce opposite phases in the Northeast and Northwest Atlantic: colder winters in the Barents Sea coupled with warmer winters in Labrador, and vice versa. In the late 1980s/early 1990s, overfished and economically crucial codfish populations declined or collapsed throughout the North Atlantic, undermining the livelihoods of hundreds of fishing communities in Norway, Atlantic Canada and elsewhere. The governments of both Norway and Canada took strict conservation steps after their crises occurred. Norwegian cod populations subsequently began to recover, but those of Canada did not--in both cases, with political, economic and social consequences. Some observers credited the superiority of Norwegian management efforts for their more favorable outcome, but climate change may well have played a role. Water temperatures on Newfoundland's Grand Banks fishing grounds tend to be colder and also more variable than those of the Norwegian Sea. Newfoundland's codfish collapse coincided with a Grand Banks cooling phase. At about the same time in the Northeast Atlantic, Norwegian fisheries' partial recovery after their crisis coincided with a warming phase. Norwegian catches increased during the early 1990s, although perhaps because of this the most recent (1996­97) estimates indicate that cod populations are now falling again.

This analysis comes from an NSF-funded project studying environment and social change in the Northern Atlantic Arc (NAARC). Principal investigators are Lawrence Hamilton, Cynthia M. Duncan and Nicholas Flanders.

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