The Regional Action Plan’s goal is to increase the production, delivery and use of climate-related information to help reduce impacts and increase resilience of the region’s living marine resources and resource-dependent communities.

NOAA Fisheries’ Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center is collaborating with others around the region to acquire needed scientific data and information for science-based strategies that sustain fisheries, healthy ecosystems and coastal communities.

This science will be used to inform policy and management decisions. “Climate-ready” management will be precautionary, preemptive and flexible enough to respond rapidly to changing environmental conditions.

Objective 5: Understand how things are changing and why; initiate laboratory and field studies to determine mechanisms linking environmental change and ecosystem response; develop economic models to assess trip costs and fisher participation under future climate conditions; and build physiologically-based models to understand climate impacts on protected species.

Objective 6: Track changes and provide early warnings; continue living marine resource assessments and ecosystem monitoring; develop and track climate indices for the council’s annual reports.

Objective 7: Build our science infrastructure; expand monitoring of climate impacts on key ecosystems, species and habitats; participate in local, national and international trainings, workshops, working groups and conferences; and regularly publish climate and ecosystem research.

Moving Forward: Implementing this plan will begin to provide the climate-related information needed to better understand, prepare for and respond to climate impacts on marine resources and the people who depend on them.

The actions will help track climate-related changes; produce better forecasts; identify effective management strategies in the face of changing climate and ocean conditions; and provide decision makers with the information they need for climate-ready decisions.

A critical element of this action plan is partnerships. The challenges are great, the issues are complex, and resources are limited. By working together, we can reduce the impacts of changing climate and ocean conditions on living marine resources, and increase the resilience of these valuable resources and the people, businesses and communities that depend on them.