Impacts of climate change on commercial fish stocks in Norwegian waters

Abstract

The Norwegian fishing areas extend over various marine ecosystems that will respond differently to climate change. In the North Sea the productivity of the boreal fish species are likely to decrease under global warming and new warm-water species are expected to become more abundant. In the arctic marine ecosystem of the Barents Sea the fish productivity is expected to increase and their distributions expand northward and eastward under global warming increasing the importance of the Russian as well as the Norwegian sectors of the Barents. In the past, decadal-scale climate variations have been shown to strongly influence productivity and distributions of fish stocks. The importance of such shorter-term variations are expected to continue also under global warming. Under global warming the optimum temperature for fish farming along the Norwegian coast will be displaced northwards from the northern part of West Norway towards the Helgeland coast.