PCLM-D-23-00181

Stay or go? Geographic variation in risks due to climate change for fishing fleets that adapt in-place or adapt on-the-move

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Samhouri,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the (minor) points raised during the review process.

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PLOS Climate

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Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: General comment: In this manuscript, authors aimed to evaluate the risk to climate change of bottom-trawlers fishing fleet in the US West Coast when applying two strategies of adapt in-place or adapt on-the-move. I really enjoyed reading the article that is very well written and explained. The approach is highly novel, because despite studies on risk assessment for fisheries are increasing, few studies compare the risk that supposed to apply different adaptation strategies. The framework presented here to evaluate two contrasting strategies that are widely proposed as mechanism of adaptation is really interesting and these results will be very important por different stakeholders when building or revising adaptation plans. Perhaps, one criticism could be that authors have used only one indicator for each of the components of the risk assessment, but it is true that using few indicators, makes this study more replicable in other areas for inter-comparisons, and facilitates the interpretation of the risk values. On the other hand, my main concern is that the values obtained should be reported as higher or lower risk in comparison to other areas/ports, but not in absolute terms. Overall, I think the paper is well done, interesting and has the potential, after some corrections, to be published. I have suggested some minor changes below for the authors to consider in revising their manuscript.

Abstract: In the sentence “Not only are they more highly exposed to climate change, but more poleward fleets can be >10X…” I would modify the “can be” since is not a possibility, you have measure it and, if I understood correctly, you conclude that are more economically dependent on groundfish in general. Please review this sentence.

INTRODUCTION section

Comment 1: at the end of the third paragraph the meaning of the sentence is not clear please rephrase it. “Coupled social-ecological analyses of a fishing community’s risk due to climate change integrate both spatial heterogeneity in the magnitude of environmental change it will experience and in these aspects of social vulnerability”.

Comment 2: at the end of the sixth paragraph “…are a useful group on which to focus because each is subject to the same…) , each vessel? Or each fleet? Please include the group you are referring to.

Comment 3: Figure 1. I think this is the only place that you use the term non-whiting bottom trawl groundfish fishery. Perhaps when describing what is considered a groundfish fishery, in the introduction or Material & Method, it should be specify that the groundfish fishery does not include whiting fishery data. Moreover, the same sentence of the figure caption is repeated twice in bold and in regular letters. Also the Theil index was not familiar for me, and it would be better to include a definition or a simple explanation of which information generates to facilitate the reader the understanding of this figure.

Comment 4: Last paragraph of the introduction. What do you mean with the term “consolidation of groundfish fleet revenue”?

METHODS section

Comment 5: in the last paragraph of the section overview, when you state that the sensitivity is defined as the economic dependence of each fleet on bottom trawl-caught groundfish relative to total commercial fishing revenue, it is not clear to me if the total commercial fishing are the same boats that go to the bottom trawl-caught groundfish, or if instead the entire fleet means that on one side there are boats that are all year round bottom trawl-caught groundfish, and then you compare with the revenue obtained from other boats such as mid-water trawlers, pelagic trawlers purse-seiners and artisanal, to calculate the dependence of the port or groups of ports on the fleet that goes to bottom trawl-caught groundfish. I think it will help to those readers not familiar with your case study area, to explain better if is the same boats that change fishery or are different boats/fleets that have different fishing tactics and metiers. And also, if when referring to “total commercial fishing” you can define it more and explain if you include only fishing fleet that operates in national waters.

Comment 6: In the Adaptive Capacity section when you quote the definition of the IPCC there is a bracket that looks like a typo “[t]he…” Please check.

Comment 7: Section Assessment of Risk Due to Climate Change, in the second paragraph you mention that you rescale the values to be between 0 and 1, that is a common practice, but I do not agree with the sentence “This reversal of scale converted these indices into measure of a lack of capacity to cope and adapt” since you have rescaled the values and a if you have a “0” is not an absolute value of lack of capacity to adapt, a value of “0” means lower capacity in comparison with other fleets/ports/group of ports.

RESULTS section

Comment 8: similar to the previous comment, in figure 3 are the ports with a sensitivity close to 1 those that presented a complete dependence of the revenues on groundfish fishery? Or since you rescaled the values could be that in this ports close to 1 in absolute values had not a 100% of the revenues coming from this fishery?

In the sentence of “varied substantially from close to zero to near complete dependence”, for me is obvious that if you have rescaled the data from 0 to 1 you have all values spectrum, but this doesn’t mean they have 100% of the earnings form the bottom-trawl groundfish fishery, it means that the areas that present higher values have higher dependence in comparison to the others.

Comment 9: results section, line 6, change (Figs. 3) to (Fig. 3)

Comment 10: Figure 3. Perhaps is something mandatory in this journal, but why do you have in the figure caption twice the same sentence, one in bold and one regular? Also, I will suggest to change it to “Economic dependence, as a measure of sensitivity, of U.S….”

Comment 11: Figure 4. The letters of the panel of the text does not correspond to the letters of the panels in the figure. Also, in Figure caption for panels e and f it will help the reader if you remind and specify that “GFDL, HADL and IPSL correspond to the three Earth system models”.

DISCUSSION section

Comment 12: In my opinion, and considering that price of fuel has increased a lot in the last years, and the availability is limited, it is not realistic to assume that the costs of fishing will remain similar to the present. This highlights the importance of using more indices to predict a more realistic risk of fishing strategies.

Comment 13: In general, I enjoyed reading the discussion and I think the authors did a great job discussing several socio-ecological aspects. But I am lacking at the end a summary paragraph or some bullet points with recommendation to decrease the risk for policymakers considering the results obtained in this risk assessment.

Reviewer #2: Overview

This paper evaluates the risk posed by climate change of 14 West Coast bottom trawl fisheries (defined by port complex) using a exposure-sensitivity-adaptive capacity framework. The authors develop and evaluate two metrics of adaptive capacity: ability to adapt in-place (diversification) and ability to adapt on-the-move (mobility). They examine exposure metrics that map to each of these categories: change in temperature within fishing grounds (adapt in-place) and distance or depth shifts required to maintain temperature of historical fishing grounds (adapt on-the move). Sensitivity is based on the importance of bottom trawl fisheries to total fisheries revenue for the port. Adaptive capacity and sensitivity get combined into a vulnerability score (low adaptive capacity + high sensitivity = high vulnerability) and risk gets quantified using the exposure and vulnerability (high risk = high exposure + high vulnerability). The authors evaluate how risk and its components relate to latitude and find evidence that risk is higher for more northern ports given their high dependence (sensitivity) on bottom trawl fisheries and high exposure to climate change. They do, however, exhibit higher mobility (maybe, there’s a lot of leverage from a few ports) and lower diversification (I’m skeptical of this, lots of leverage from some ports). The paper is very well-written. The methods are good but I have some comments about need to rigorously evaluate and interpret leverage. I also have some minor comments about (1) a new figure; (2) flipping axes in Figures 5+6, and (3) cosmetic things.

I want to flag that there were no line numbers in the manuscript. This makes reviewing papers very challenging. This is an extreme oversight of the authors and the journal. Please always provide continuous line numbers. Papers without continuous line numbers should not be sent out for review.

Major comments

In general, I think the role of latitude is overstated and overinterpreted. There is a clear role in exposure (Figure 4) but the role in sensitivity (Figure 3) looks very weak and the role in adaptive capacity (Figure 5) looks highly driven by a few fleets that exert a lot of leverage. The role on risk (Figure 6) looks convincing but I suspect this is largely being driven by the exposure pattern. I would like to see a more rigorous examination of the (1) significance of the sensitivity relationship and (2) the leverage exerted by a few ports in the adaptive capacity relationship. Visually, I would have thought that diversification increased with latitude, but the authors find the opposite, which I think is driven by extremely high leverage from Puget Sound and Santa Barbara. Similarly, the increase in mobility with latitude is principally driven by high leverage from Puget Sound and South/Central WA Coast. I would like to see the leverage examined and considered more deeply and the use of robust regression, like Thiel-Sen or something else, that is robust to endpoints/leverage/outliers to evaluate these relationships. I think the authors should be prepared for latitude to not matter that much. The paper is still highly important because it quantifies fleet-level risk to climate change, but the latitude story might not be there, or it might be solely driven by exposure, which is fine.

Figure 3 requires a confidence interval and the significance of this regression should be provided inside the figure. This latitudinal relationship, visually, looks very weak.

The axes should be flipped for Figures 3, 5 and 6 because latitude is the explanatory variable (x-axis).

A new figure should be added to show a scatterplot of fleets with the following: scaled exposure on the x-axis, the combined and scaled vulnerability on the y-axis, the point fill equal to latitude, and the point size equal to the risk determination. This will help the reader understand how the risk is determined (Euclidean distance from zero) and understand the role of latitude. There would be two panels: adapt-in place risk and adapt-on the move risk.

Minor comments

Abstract

• “economic dependence of more poleward fleets”

• Could modify to “mobility (adapt on-the-move) and diversification (adapt in-place)” to connect back to adaptation options

Introduction

• Page 5, line 3 – worth mentioning that adapt in-place and adapt on-the-move are not mutually exclusive and fishers/fleets might do both

• “and the revenue generated from this fishery is increasingly concentrated within fewer ports, primarily in Oregon”

• Period missing after “Fig” in many places

Methods

• Overview section – are “risk” and “vulnerability” identical? Can you choose one and be consistent throughout?

• Overview – is the fleet also non-whiting since this is what was implied in the Figure? This should be made clear and explained.

• From Fig 2 caption it sounds like risk = exposure + vulnerability (sensitivity/adaptive capacity) – make this clear in overview

• What is the spatial reporting in logbooks? Lat/longs or statistical areas?

• What is the resolution of the NGDC bathymetry?

• When the reported depth and extracted depth don’t match, it could be b/c the coordinates are misreported or the depth is misreported, you don’t know which

• “ten kilometer” or “10 km” – ‘ten km” looks weird

• Why 75% and not 95% sensu 95% utilization areas?

• Caveat that using 8.5 is the most severe climate scenario and acknowledge this shortcoming with this paper: https://academic.oup.com/icesjms/article/80/5/1163/7103492

• Citing st_join() seems unnecessary

• Can you add a sentence stating that the units for the exposure metric are esstially standard deviations of temperature change relative to baseline? Just spell this out and make it explicit.

• I think the exposure for displacement units are in kilometers that would have to be shifted to maintain an isotherm, correct? Make explicit what the units are?

• Adaptative Capacity section – IPCC not in title case

• Adaptative Capacity section – cite the whole Cinner adaptive capacity domains stuff

• The use of the 95th percentile in the mobility index seems aligned with my recommendation to use the 95th percentile in the fishing grounds delinieation

• “To evaluate whether there were”

• I’d like to see a plot of the scaled exposure and sensitivities metrics in the main text. This would help the reader understand the Euclidean distance to the origin. And it would look like the plots often shown for these sort of exposure-vulnerability-risk assessments

• Can you spell out the reasons behind the chouice of family in the models? i.e., explain how the response is distributued

Results

• Setup the whole polward thing by saying “The more southern SF, SB, and LA port groups…; The more northern PS, Ast, etc…”

Tables and figures

Fig 1a and 1b. Are revenues adjusted for inflation, i.e., are they all 2022 USD?

Fig 1 caption – no Oxford comma after before “and (e)”

Figure 3 – say what the line represents, add confidence interval, flip axes

Figure 4 – what is IO-PAC?

Figure 5 – Santa Barbara and Puget Sound look like they are exerting a ton of leverage on this because visually, to me, it looks like diversification increase with latitude (see high diverification in Astoria, Newport, Coos Bay, Brookings) and low diversification everywhere south but SF and SB. I would use robust regression (Thiel-Sen) and really interrogate the leverage here.

Figure 5. I’d call out the significant leverage and threshold driven by Puget Sound and SC-WA coast in mobility. Also latitude should be on x-axis (explanatory variable) and mobility and diversification should be on y-axis

Figure 6 – also flip axes

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Stay or go? Geographic variation in risks due to climate change for fishing fleets that adapt in-place or adapt on-the-move

PCLM-D-23-00181R1

Dear Dr. Samhouri,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Stay or go? Geographic variation in risks due to climate change for fishing fleets that adapt in-place or adapt on-the-move' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

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Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):