About the Tool
What does the Climate-Resilient Fisheries (CRF) Planning Tool do?
The Climate-Resilient Fisheries Planning Tool guides users through a six-step process to assess their fishery’s climate resilience and identify approaches and priority actions to help build resilience in their fishery.
Who should use it?
The tool is designed for fishery participants, community leaders, managers, NGO partners, scientists, and others seeking to enhance the resilience of marine fisheries to climate change. The tool can be used by individuals and by groups, such as stakeholders in workshops.
Why use the CRF Planning Tool?
Any initiative intended to increase the climate resilience of a fishery will be a complex, long-term, and multifaceted process. To facilitate successful outcomes, the Climate-Resilient Fisheries Planning Tool helps users identify and focus their efforts on attributes of the fishery system that have the greatest potential to strengthen climate resilience. The tool is based on rigorous scientific research, analysis of case studies exploring climate resilience in various fisheries, and expert consensus regarding key actions for climate resilience. The tool can be used even when detailed data on current and projected climate impacts are not available.
How is the CRF Planning Tool used?
The tool facilitates an assessment of ecological, socio-economic, and governance dimensions of a fishery system that enables users to prioritize interventions across these dimensions based on the planning goals, expected climate impacts, and resilience attributes present in the fishery. Through a six-step process, the tool supports users in developing a set of actionable interventions and priorities to operationalize climate resilience in the fishery. The steps are presented on a series of web pages with a downloadable workbook providing a worksheet for each step. After completing Steps 1-6, tool users come away with a prioritized list of potential actions aimed at building climate resilience that can be used to build a fishery climate resilience plan. In many cases, it may be valuable to use the tool iteratively, such as by repeating Steps 1-6 annually, to help refine and adjust climate resilience actions over time, especially as new information on climate impacts and effects to the system come to light.
What is climate resilience?
Resilience is the capacity to prepare for, resist, cope with, recover from, or adapt to a given stressor to ensure the sustainability of marine ecosystems, fishery resources, and human benefits. For an introduction to climate resilience in concept and practice:
Who developed the CRF Planning Tool?
The Climate-Resilient Fisheries Planning Tool is a product of the Science for Nature and People Partnership (SNAPP) working group on Climate-Resilient Fisheries. Learn more about us on the Who We Are page.
What is the scientific foundation for the tool?
The SNAPP working group on Climate-Resilient Fisheries used an iterative process of literature review and expert knowledge to generate, refine, define, and exemplify attributes of resilience in fisheries systems.
The working group identified 38 attributes as relevant to the resilience of marine fisheries to climate change. The attributes’ directionality, mechanism, context, capacities, and scale were then examined across 18 fisheries case studies to understand which attributes were present and how they operate in response to various climate-related stressors. Experts from these 18 fisheries scored and ranked the importance of these attributes for climate resilience within their fisheries, and the responses validated the 38 climate resilience attributes across diverse fisheries social-ecological systems.
These 38 attributes were merged and reduced to a set of 22 which were determined to be identifiable and operational for use in the CRF Planning Tool. This modified set of attributes used in the Tool provides users with a more streamlined and accessible process for assessing climate-resilience attributes in fishery systems.
The following publications provide in-depth information about the research behind the tool:
- Attributes of climate resilience in fisheries: From theory to practice (Mason, Eurich, Lau, et al. 2022)
- Diverse pathways for climate resilience in fishery systems (Eurich, Friedman, Kleisner, Zhao, et al. In prep.)
Download the Tool Workbook
The Climate-Resilient Fisheries Planning Tool workbook provides worksheets for completing Tool Steps 1-6. The downloadable workbook is available in two formats.
Download Workbook (MS Excel format)
The Microsoft Excel file is the full-featured version of the workbook and is recommended for use when possible. It requires a computer with Microsoft Excel.
Download Workbook (PDF format)
The PDF file is a printable version of the workbook. It does not offer auto-populating spreadsheets and other interactive features. However, it can be used in situations where computers are unavailable.
Video: Introduction to the CRF Planning Tool Workbook
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