Workshop on pathways to climate-aware advice (WKCLIMAD)

The Workshop on pathways to climate-aware advice (WKCLIMAD) met in the autumn of 2021 to develop a proposal for an advisory framework that accounts for the influences of climate change on aquaculture, fisheries, and ecosystems. The workshop worked through online sessions with over 40 participants. Climate-informed advice should be provided through a risk-based framework that considers magnitude and likelihood of impacts, effectiveness and feasibility of measures. A wealth of data, tools and methods exists to on-ramp the advice. However, it is important to consider how these are utilised. To provide robust climate-informed advice, there is a need to identify and rank climate impacts and the associated risks, and match adaptation measures with public policy objectives. There must be a balance between actionable advice and reporting of uncertainty. The next steps for ICES should be to evaluate these three recommended additions to the advice framework/principles: • Development of a framework for spatial knowledge and advice, that includes definitions of temporal and spatial scale of management challenges. • Proactive solicitation of experts and stakeholders in relevant fields. Co-production of knowledge with iterative feedback, accounting for the plurality of knowledge and participation mechanisms. • Formulation of a plan for outputs, and communication, from the start of process, including allocation of sufficient resources to deliver advice. Greater emphasis needs to be placed on the communication and co-creation of advice. Climate-informed advice should include an assessment of current conditions in relation to the desired state. This requires not just an evaluation of the current state of the system, but the likely and/or desired future state of the fisheries/aquaculture system. This will also require greater effort on scoping of future scenarios of ecosystem state, and potential management measures for adaptation, and