Will commercial fishing be a safe occupation in future? A framework to quantify future fishing risks due to climate change scenarios

Weather factors are an intrinsic part of the fishing environment. Changes in weather patterns due to climate change may affect the fishing environment and fishing safety. This article proposes a general framework to quantify fishing incident risks in the future due to changes in weather conditions. This framework first builds relationships between fishing safety and weather conditions based on historical data and then predicts future risks according to these relationships with respect to potential changes in weather patterns. This paper applies the suggested framework using fishing incident data, fishing activity levels, and extreme weather conditions in Atlantic Canada to estimate the spatial distribution of fishing incident rates in the future. To do so, a classification tree is applied to historical storm tracks based on several climate models and then generated rules are applied to future storm tracks projected by selected climate change models towards the end of this century to predict fishing risk rates associated with changes in weather factors. We conclude that the environmental conditions that drive fishing incidents are projected to remain very similar by the end of this century.