Climate change attribution, appraisal, and adaptive capacity for fishermen in the Gulf of Alaska

Impacts of climate change are evident and intensifying for coastal communities and natural resource-dependent stakeholders. As climate impacts mount, so does the need to understand mechanisms that enable and impede proactive adaptation. Through two years of focus groups and interviews with fisheries participants in the Gulf of Alaska, we explore subjective climate change attribution—the expressed connection between an observed ecosystem change and climate change itself—amongst fisheries stakeholders, and its extension to other stakeholders and coastal communities. Participants’ observations differentiate fishing communities’ experiences of climate change, revealing perceptions of marine heatwave impacts and trends in target and non-target fishery species. We interrogate these findings through models for climate attribution, risk appraisal, and adaptive capacity. Fishermen (We use the term fishermen instead of fishers in keeping with how those participating in the fishing industry in Alaska refer to themselves, irrespective of their gender) recognize tremendous ecosystem change but convey a mismatch between those observations and climate attribution. Perceptions of individual risk and adaptive capacity are complicated by psychological roadblocks, opportunity costs, and a lack of perceived options for adaptation. Yet fishermen’s discussion reveals pathways to reconcile observations of change with attribution, risk appraisal, and adaptive capacity, especially with science in a critical role to bridge the gaps within and across these processes for fishermen, natural resource users, and coastal communities more broadly.