Excerpt from "Global Warming, Climate Change and the Fly Angler" by Frank Wood as seen in the winter issue of Fly Fusion

It was exactly ten years ago that I read my first story about Global Warming and the potential effects it would have on our coldwater fisheries. It was a well-written article complete with maps displaying forecasted habitat loss. As shocking as these predictions were, I read the story, marked the pages, and ended up filing it away with my other magazines of interest. At the time I recall thinking that this was still
way off in the future, and we still had time to prevent it from coming true.

As often happens in my life, other concerns set in – and I completely forgot about the story. That is until a little over a year ago while reading a Web Forum post referring to Global Warming. It hit me that I had not seen any new material relating to freshwater fisheries since that first story, so I decided it was past time to see what new information was out there.

Although I was able to locate a mountain of reference material, as far as freshwater fisheries are concerned - we are still in the process of modelling valid impact scenarios. I suspect that this is partly due to fish having to compete with many other species for a finite amount of research funding. From the point of media coverage, it is also more difficult to connect with the intended audience at the same emotional level as you could showing a polar bear swimming in an ocean (seemingly) devoid of offshore ice. This is unfortunate, as fish species and their communities are excellent indicators of the overall health and well being of the aquatic ecosystems in which they are found.

Regardless of perceptions and incomplete data sets however, we are already currently experiencing the effects of climate change. The problem facing scientists is that fisheries are complex ecosystems with variables affecting them that we still do not fully understand. This means that accurate forecasting models are difficult to create...........

..........Societies across the world have a long record of adapting and reducing their vulnerability to the impacts of weather and climate related events such as floods, droughts and storms. Nevertheless, additional adaptation measures will be required at regional and local levels to reduce the adverse impacts of projected climate change and variability, regardless of the scale of mitigation undertaken over the next two to three decades. Adaptation alone is not expected to cope with all the projected effects of climate change, especially not over the long term as most impacts increase in magnitude.

We are already behind the eight ball in the fight to preserve and protect our freshwater fisheries. While the debate over whether Global Warming is occurring or not has been laid to rest, we are still struggling to determine what the actual effects will be - with limited available data. Once we know the impacts, we still have to determine the best means to adapt to, or mitigate them.

It also doesn’t help that the aquatic ecosystems are complex, resulting in resistance from governmental departments in investing their limited budgets to study them. And yet study them we must, for if we don’t, we will not understand how to fix them.