Vulnerability to Effects of Climate Change on Fisheries Index for RCP 4.5 (2016-2050)

The Fishery Vulnerability Index was developed by Blasiak et al., with support from the World Climate Research Programme, and calculates the vulnerability of fishing markets from the effects of climate change on fisheries around the world, using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) definition of vulnerability as a function of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Data on global sea surface anomaly predictions according to various RCP (Representative Concentration Pathways) scenarios are combined with various socioeconomic data sets that illustrate the sensitivity of countries' fisheries (i.e., number of fishers, fisheries export as percentage of total, proportion of the economically active population (EAP) working as fishers, total fisheries landings, nutritional dependence) and overall adaptive capacity of the country's population/government/fishing industry (i.e., healthy life expectancy, literacy rate + school enrollment, governance, gross domestic product per capita, subsidies per landed monetary volume, proportion of industrial to small-scale fisheries) to determine the overall vulnerability of national fisheries. 147 coastal countries have an index score for different scenarios for 2016-2050 and 2066-2100. Source: SU/UTokyo/JCU/UWaterloo License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/]