August 10, 2022 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
The Pacific Islands Vulnerability Assessment project evaluated the susceptibility of 83 marine species in the Pacific Islands region to the impacts of climate change. We identified key attributes and factors that drive this vulnerability, as well as critical data gaps in understanding climate change impacts on marine life.
The most vulnerable to climate change were the invertebrate group; the least vulnerable were pelagic and coastal groups not associated with coral reefs. Sea surface temperature, ocean acidification, and oxygen concentration are the main drivers of vulnerability among all of the environmental stressors we examined.
The goal of the assessment was to answer key questions:
- Which species are most vulnerable to climate change?
- Are there aspects of their life cycle that should be of concern?
- What are the critical stressors involved?
- Where should science and management focus efforts to reduce these risks?
Dr. Don Kobayashi, assessment lead, shares, “The project is critically important to the NOAA mission because there are still too many unknowns about the impacts of climate change to our marine fisheries and ecosystems. This work gives us broad insights across many species and across many ecosystems spanning the entire Pacific Islands region. We simply do not have the time to answer pressing questions about climate change by the usual approach of exhaustively studying one or a few species in a single location at a single point in time and moving on. We need more work like this that provides a synoptic bigger picture view of climate change impacts across the board.”