Coastal fisheries adaptations to increasing climate change exposure in Japan

Abstract Climate change‐driven ocean warming is altering the geographic ranges of species, leading to a poleward shift of tropical species into temperate regions (tropicalisation). This threatens the native marine community assemblages by changing the availability of traditional marine resources, thus impacting the livelihood and well‐being of coastal fisheries. Fishers' individual responses are expected to transition from remaining to coping and from adapting to transforming as climate change exposure increases, yet empirical evidence is limited. The existing strong thermal gradient along the western coast of Shikoku (Japan), an area experiencing tropicalisation, provides a unique opportunity to analyse how regions facing different climate change exposure levels (North: low, Centre: medium and South: high) affect fishers' responses in relation to their adaptive capacity. Data from 92 face‐to‐face interviews with small‐scale fishers from 25 locations revealed that the largest proportion of coping and adaptive responses is in the Central region, while remaining responses predominated in the Northern and Southern regions. Results from a multinomial logistic model indicate that the exposure level is a good predictor for coping and adaptive responses but not for transformative ones. This possibly reflects the fact that these fishers might have exited coastal fisheries prior to our study as suggested by the strong fisher population decrease in the communities from the Southern region over the last three decades. This study provides novel empirical evidence on how climate change exposure influences fishers' responses to past and current climate change impacts, highlighting the intricate interplay between exposure level and individual adaptive capacity. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.