With oceans warming by a third since the Industrial Revolution, and the world’s oceans warming faster than ever, the world has a lot of catching up to do to tackle the issue.
But a new study suggests that the impacts are not being managed well enough to keep marine ecosystems in check.
The results are a blow to marine scientists and the governments they work for, and raise questions about whether the world is truly prepared to address the threat of climate change.
Researchers from the University of Bath and the University at Albany, New York, used satellite data to monitor changes in fish populations in a global network of fisheries management stations, known as the global fishery management network.
The network is designed to measure changes in fishery resources over time, and it was built in part to track the effects of climate and pollution on fish populations.
They looked at how fish stocks in different areas of the world were affected by different warming scenarios, and found that the global fishing fleet was suffering from a major slowdown.
In a paper published in Science Advances, the researchers say the slowdown was so severe that fisheries management in many parts of the ocean had to be scaled back to meet the needs of fishers.
It also meant that the system could no longer account for the increased impact of warming on fish stocks and the fish-eating ecosystem, which was also affected by climate change and pollution.
The study looked at the total number of fish stocks worldwide from 1990 to 2015.
It found that fish stocks decreased by about 9 percent in every year between 1995 and 2015, and that the number of catches declined by more than 70 percent between 1995-2015.
It also found that, in the last year of the network’s life, global fishing capacity declined by 4 percent.
The researchers estimate that the slowdown would have been much more severe had there not been a change in the global climate.
The global fisherry management network was set up in the 1990s to help manage fisheries that were declining due to climate change, but it has been underfunded and under-managed, according to the researchers.
The researchers used data from a wide range of fishery data to look at the effect of climate on fish in each of the countries they looked at.
They used the same data set in their study, and they found that all three countries were experiencing a decline in fish stocks between 1990 and 2015.
The countries with the lowest fish stocks were India, where fishery catches declined from 4 million tonnes in 1990 to just 7.7 million tonnes today, the US, which has the highest fish stocks at 13.5 million tonnes, and China, which is the only country that catches more than 5 million tonnes of fish each year.
The authors of the study say that the lack of funding and the under-funding of fisheries operations in many countries is one of the main reasons why global fish stocks are being harmed.
“We’ve got some of the most under-funded fisheries systems on the planet, and this has to be a major contributor to their decline,” said senior author Dr Matthew Riddell.
“It’s not just fish stocks that are under-resourced, but also the fish ecosystem.
And the fisheries ecosystem has a major impact on the health of fish populations.”
The researchers also found a strong correlation between climate change effects on fish and fish-friendly measures, such as improved water quality.
The findings have raised concerns about how fisheries management systems are managed globally.
“The impact of climate-driven changes in fisheries has a devastating impact on species, particularly on marine species,” said co-author Dr Nick Beaudin, from the Australian Centre for Marine Science at the University in Adelaide.
“When you think about the potential effects on marine ecosystems, fish are at the very forefront.”
The study is the first to look specifically at changes in global fish populations from the 1980s to the mid-1990s.
It says that the trends shown in this paper are similar to those that have been observed globally over the past 50 years, including a slowdown in fish catch from 1990 until around 2000.
“But the global catch decline we’ve seen over the last few decades has been driven by global warming, and we think that this slowdown was largely the result of changes in the world fishing industry,” said Dr Beaudins.
Dr Riddells said that the current system is not working.
“In the United States, we have some of our most successful fishery managers, but we have a lot more underfunded fishery operations,” he said.
“And in China, we see a slowdown, and so it seems like they’ve lost an enormous amount of catch.”
The research was funded by the Australian Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council.