Enlightening Fishers’ adaptive capacity with local participatory approaches: Mediterranean Fisheries

Climate change is rapidly becoming one of the biggest threats to marine life, and its impacts have the potential to strongly affect fisheries upon which millions of people rely. This is particularly crucial for the Mediterranean Sea, which is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, one of the world’s most overfished regions, and where temperatures are rising 25% more than in the rest of the ocean on average. To have a better understanding of the current risk for its fisheries we calculated a vulnerability index for 100 species that compose 95% of the Mediterranean fisheries catches, following a trait-based approach. Through the Climate Risk Assessment methodology (CRA) we subsequently assessed all Mediterranean fisheries’ risk to climate change based on their catch composition. This work allowed to contrast the southern and northern Mediterranean regions but has shown its limits by only relying on macro indicators, particularly when trying to quantify fisheries’ adaptive capacity. Having an accurate understanding of local efforts in management and socio-economic assets is essential to reliably address the adaptive capacity of a community. To address these gaps in knowledge, participatory approaches can help to integrate local knowledge and co-construct adaptive responses while considering scientific assessments and projections, as well as local perspectives on feasibility, risks, and benefits. With these objectives in mind, we conducted participatory workshops with fisheries’ stakeholders in France and Tunisia (case studies in the northern and southern Mediterranean Sea, respectively). Their purpose was to co-construct a semi-structured interview guide that then allowed us to collate further information with a significant number of direct fishers’ interviews in the field. Through macro and local approaches that complement each other, we can more reliably determine the main challenges and risks faced by Mediterranean fisheries, their main concerns, and their current capacity to overcome them