December 19, 2018 — The North Pacific Fisheries Management Council has adopted a new ecosystem-based plan to manage Alaska’s Bering Sea, where climate change is affecting coastal communities and commercial fisheries.
The Bering Sea is among the world’s most productive regions for seafood, but warming water temperatures and a lack of sea ice over recent years have forced the NPFMC to consider new approaches to its management of the sea’s fisheries.
The result is the Bering Sea Fisheries Ecosystem Plan(FEP), a 150-page document adopted by the NPFMC this month intended to provide a more agile and inclusive framework for the quickly changing ecosystem.
“One of the things that was very important to the council was making sure that we have the tools in place to be able to respond to changing climate conditions by some of our modules that look at evaluating the resiliency of the management framework and different tools that are available to address the bigger-picture more holistic questions,” said Diana Evans, the council’s primary staff lead for the FEP.
Evans and her colleagues worked for four years to develop the new plan, taking in extensive input from stakeholders and local and traditional communities who live on the coastal Bering Sea – the latter a primary focus of the FEP.