In an assessment of 22 small-scale fisheries that experience climate stressors, researchers revealed that diversity and flexibility are among the most important adaptive capacity factors overall, while access to financial assets was not as important for individual households as it was at the community scale.<\/p>\n
While previous research has calculated a quantitative or numerical resilience score for different regions and sectors, the focus on community response is fairly new, according to senior author Larry Crowder, the Edward Ricketts Provostial Professor and professor of biology in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. He said: “Millions of people are dependent on making a living in small-scale fisheries, and some of them are currently doing it better than others.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we can identify the features that allow communities and individuals to be better prepared for those perturbations \u2013 in other words, to have an adaptive response \u2013 then we can try to build that capacity in communities that don’t have it.”<\/p>\n
The researchers found that diversity and flexibility were important at every scale, for both community and household adaptive capacity in responding to acute and chronic stressors \u2013 for example, being able to diversify fishing<\/a> portfolios or shift to other means of income. In addition to climate stressors, the researchers assessed responses to biological, economic, political, and social changes, as well as environmental degradation and overfishing. The patterns that emerged from the study may be applied to adaptive capacity in other sectors, such as agriculture or manufacturing.<\/p>\n