Giving Compass' Take:

• Nicolaas Mink explains that climate change has increased the temperature of the ocean, rendering formerly-sustainable fisheries unsustainable. 

• How can funders help to ensure long-term food security under a changing climate? 

• Learn how inefficiencies lead to the waste of fish. 

After decades of flourishing as the North Star for fisheries managers, activist consumers, and, even corporate America, sustainable seafood fell victim to climate change in the Gulf of Alaska.  There, on December 6, in one of the best-managed fishing grounds the world has ever known, biologists declared that there weren’t enough Pacific cod to sustain a fishery. The water had simply become too warm for cod to reproduce.

The closing of that fishery, no matter how long it lasts, should end all doubt that sustainable wild harvested fisheries are environmental fictions that no longer serve utility in the era of climate catastrophe. (This op-ed, and its claims, focuses strictly on wild-harvested fisheries. It make no claims about aquaculture or farmed fish, which, too, will face new realities with climate change, only different ones that are beyond the scope of this op-ed.)

If ever there was a place where good management and human ingenuity should have sustained a wild harvest, it was in the Gulf of Alaska, where state and federal agencies annually spend millions of dollars on research and management. From here forward, the longer we perpetuate the myth of sustainability in fisheries the more lasting damage we will do to fish populations, fishermen, and, ultimately, the eaters who want to consume fish.

Read the full article about climate change and sustainable seafood by Nicolaas Mink at The New Food Economy.