Shifting seas, shifting strategies: Global evidence on fisheries’ adaptation margins and the limits of climate resilience

This paper examines how ocean warming reshapes marine production through changes in fishing behaviour and method composition. We combine global monthly oceanographic conditions with AIS-based fishing activity for 2012–2019 at 0.5 ° × 0.5 ° resolution, and use country-level capture and aquaculture data as background production context. The main empirical design estimates temperature-bin effects on fishing hours with cell fixed effects, hemisphere-by-year-month fixed effects, ocean controls, and cell-clustered inference. Fishing effort is lower in colder states and rises in moderate-warm bins relative to the [ 15,20 ) ° C benchmark, while the coefficient in the hottest reported surface bin is smaller. Complementary outcomes show that this profile combines participation and intensity margins. Geartype-specific regressions show that fishing methods respond differently to warmer states: some longline categories expand, trawlers weaken at the hot tail, and squid jiggers decline. These results show reallocation in observed fishing effort and method composition, with heterogeneous responses across thermal states.