Reckoning with Climate Change and the Gulf of Maine

Goodbye, Lobsters?

Significant species migration due to climate change is already occurring in the Gulf of Maine. “The textbook example is cod,” says Frederich, “which are basically gone from the Gulf of Maine; while up in Iceland, they're catching a ton of cod right now.” And while Maine’s state-defining lobster fishery is currently considered healthy, warming has sent lobsters scurrying both northward and further out to sea in search of colder water. As a result, lobstering is mostly a thing of the past in Southern New England, and, as the Gulf continues to warm, there is a possibility that the lobsters could eventually migrate beyond the reach of Maine’s lobstermen and women.

At the same time, warm-water species are moving rapidly into the Gulf of Maine. “Lobstermen in Maine frequently report catching blue crabs in their traps,” says Frederich. “Even seahorses, black sea bass — all these warm-water species are being found more and more frequently now.”

Winners and Losers

“When people talk about climate change,” he elaborates, “they always talk about how everything will die or everything will be terrible. It's actually much more complicated because there will be winners, and there will be losers with climate change.” And in the Gulf of Maine? Frederich delivers the bad news: “Turns out most of our native species are on the side of the losers, and they don't do so well with climate change. Lots of the invasive species, they are on the winners’ side.”

Right now, the winners include the Gulf’s exploding green crab population. “They eat all the juvenile soft-shell clams and whatever juvenile critters they can find,” explains Frederich, “and severely impact the whole ecosystem by eradicating soft-shell clam fisheries.” Even more rapacious are the green crabs found in Nova Scotia, which are a hybrid of the Maine green crabs and a species invasive to Canada. “We've seen them literally jumping out of the water at us,” he continues. “It’s level of aggression that I've never seen before. If we think we have a green crab problem now, once those Canadian green crabs move into our area, it'll be much more emphasized.”

Susan Farady and the Policy Lag

Susan Farady, J.D., is an assistant professor of marine affairs, who teaches interdisciplinary courses on marine law and policy. She sees climate change undermining the entire scientific basis of marine governance and regulation. “All of the laws that are responsible for how we manage our natural resources are premised on the fact that we have good science and a pretty stable system,” says Farady. “We plug in the data and crank out results, right? Here's how many fish you can pull out. Here's how the Saco is going to stay sustainable over X number of years…”

But now? “The thing that I tell my students is that history is getting less and less relevant and geography is getting less and less important,” says Farady. As climate-change effects increase, marine species migrate in unpredictable and unstable patterns, making fisheries management more and more of a crapshoot. “Our management system for fisheries isn't nimble enough to respond to such rapid change,” she says.

System Vs. Reality: Not a Great Fit

The regional councils that manage commercial fisheries in federal waters are divided mostly along previously stable ecosystem boundaries and rely on past activity and stock assessments to make accurate predictions moving forward to guide policy decisions. As those boundaries and assessments lose their validity, it could throw the management system into chaos.

“We have species of squid that have migrated and are now landed almost entirely by the Rhode Island fleet, but they're still managed by the Mid-Atlantic Council,” says Farady. “Rhode Island isn't part of that council. Is that shift forever or is it a few years? We have no idea. That’s an example of where the geography doesn't fit what's going on with the system. The analogy I like to think of is the stepsister trying to get her foot in a glass slipper. It’s just not a great fit, and it's only going to become a harder fit in the future.”

The Insurance Barometer

Faraday decries the fact that there is very little work being done to address climate change at the federal level. But like Peter Slovinsky, she is quick to point to activity at the state and local level.

“I'm driving downtown in Portland,” says Farady, “and I'm seeing all of that infrastructure being built so close to the water, and I know J's Oyster [a popular waterfront restaurant] is flooding all the time. Are we thinking about higher buildings, more resilient buildings, and not putting the boiler in the basement?”

Farady believes that it is only a matter of time until financial considerations force all coastal communities to seriously plan around potential flood events and other climate-change impacts. “I think one thing that's going to start happening is that insurance and property value is going to start to drive behavior,” she says. “I think the question is whether we're smart enough to get ahead of those trends. Because at some point, after two or three or four catastrophic losses in a coastal community, an insurer is not going to be willing to insure properties for a price that people are willing to pay.”

Meaghan Daly and the Societal Impact

Or a price that everyone is able pay. That’s where social scientist Meaghan Daly, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies, comes in. Daly explains that climate change is what social scientists call a “threat multiplier,” in that it takes existing social, political, and economic challenges and exacerbates them. “There's a really important element of social justice that's wrapped up in climate change,” says Daly. “As many have pointed out, people who are already most vulnerable — socially, economically — are going to have the most difficulty responding to climate change. Which means, as researchers and as policymakers, it's really up to us to figure out how can we level the playing field.”

Who Benefits from Aquaculture?

Daly’s current research project looks at the intersection of aquaculture and climate change in Maine. As the state’s coastal communities and fisheries (including the lobster fishery) are challenged by many different factors, including climate change, aquaculture has been offered as a potential option to provide a diversified livelihood strategy or a new livelihood altogether for Mainers who have traditionally made their living from the Gulf. Among the questions Daly’s team considers are, “Who are the people who are able to undertake aquaculture here in Maine?” and “Who is benefiting from that transition?”

“There are many reasons why aquaculture would be appealing to displaced lobstermen and women,” says Daly. “It enables them to stay on the water and remain in communities where they have homes.” But the transition can also present a set of challenges. “They are used to being out on the water, and they don't really see themselves as farmers, per se, so there is a change in their identity and a change in how they approach their work.” There are also economic and regulatory barriers, such as obtaining necessary permits, and getting through the leasing process can take time. “We can help people who are interested in aquaculture,” says Daly, “so they can navigate those challenges more effectively.”

“A lot of our fishermen and fisherwomen here in Maine are owner-operators,” she explains. “As small businesses, they may not have as many resources to do research as larger corporations or larger businesses have when setting up aquaculture projects.” But that doesn’t mean that lobstermen and women don’t have a wealth of valuable firsthand knowledge to bring to the table, and much of Daly’s work involves fostering communication among different stakeholders who may not always trust one another.

Establishing Collaborative Knowledge Processes

“There are a lot of challenges in getting people to engage in these collaborative knowledge processes,” she says. “First of all, it's just time consuming. But more fundamentally, there are differences or imbalances in power. A lot of average citizens are intimidated by researchers or scientists. They may think, ‘Well, those are the experts. What do I know?’ What we focus on is enabling those citizens, whether it's, for example, fishermen or coastal property owners, to recognize that they actually have a lot of valuable knowledge that can contribute to these processes.”

The processes require time and trust on all sides, but when they work, they can open up genuinely fresh perspectives on entrenched problems. “People start to speak the same language, they start to understand each other, and they start to recognize that those other people in the room aren't a threat,” says Daly. “They're actually partners who can help each other solve those problems. And that's really, really valuable when we're talking about how to manage some of the really large societal challenges that we're going to see with climate change.”

Overcoming Climate-Change Denial

One of the larger societal challenges is simple denial: many people refuse to accept climate-change science as fact, and even those who do accept the evidence, intellectually, may not be sufficiently motivated to alter their behavior. Daly is sympathetic. “Addressing climate change requires some really deep changes in how we live, and that can threaten people's values,” she says. “That can threaten their identities and threaten their livelihoods. So, it makes sense that people are resistant to having those conversations.”

This poses a challenge for social scientists. “As researchers,” she continues, “we need better ways of communicating and connecting to help people understand that climate change isn't just a far-away problem, and it isn't something that they can ignore. Because the livelihoods and wellbeing they currently enjoy are directly threatened.”

James Herbert and the Psychological Principles Underlying Denial

UNE President James Herbert, a clinical psychologist with a research background in cognitive behavior therapy, shared some insights about the psychology underlying climate-change denial. “Well, for one thing,” says Herbert, “we tend to think in terms of our own lifetimes: ‘How is this going to affect me?’ And then, as you get older, if you have kids, you start to think, ‘How is this going to affect my kids?’ Eventually, you might think, ‘How's it going to affect my grandkids?’ But very few people think about their great, great, great grandkids. If I said, ‘Think about how this policy is going to affect your great, great, great grandkids, most people would shrug: ‘I'll never know them.’”

Future Discounting

This is called ‘future discounting,’ a psychological principle that Herbert describes as “a very natural human phenomenon whereby we put much more emphasis on shorter term effects than we do longer term effects.” What makes climate change such a difficult problem for us to wrap our minds around is that continuing current practices, such as status quo fossil fuel use, brings great short-term benefits, while the consequences of those practices will be mostly felt in the long term. And, Herbert points out, “We need to make sacrifices today, but people who are going to be benefiting from those sacrifices are mostly going to be those future generations.”

Diffusion of Responsibility and Motivated Reasoning

Herbert mentions several other factors influencing the denial mindset. One is “diffusion of responsibility,” the widespread belief that the actions of a single person can’t make a difference. Another is “motivated reasoning,” which describes the fact that our reasoning is never purely objective — however much we might like to think it is. A common form of motivated reasoning is “confirmation bias,” which describes how incoming data is filtered according to existing beliefs and biases. “We are selectively attuned to data that fit our preexisting beliefs, and conversely, we tend to ignore data that don't,” says Herbert. “A person who is disinclined to believe in climate-change will find it easy to maintain that disbelief even in spite of mounting data to the contrary, simply because of the confirmation bias.”

Interestingly, research shows that higher intelligence is often correlated with greater cognitive rigidity, which may seem counterintuitive. After all, shouldn’t an increase in brain power give a person open-mindedness and flexibility of thought? Herbert explains, “The reason for the rigidity is that the more intelligent a person is, the more equipped they are to construct arguments against a position even when the actual evidence suggests otherwise. Verbal fluency, verbal reasoning, all those things we think of as cognitive assets, can actually work to strengthen cognitive filters, even against overwhelming data to the contrary.”

The good news, says Herbert, is that once we identify these psychological phenomena, we can begin to find ways to address them. “For example, with respect to diffusion of responsibility, we can work on building a social environment where people are strongly encouraged or incentivized to take collective action. You make it a community norm to do the right thing.”

Changing Mindsets

Encouragement that public mindsets are changing can be found in work done at Yale by Anthony Leiserowitz, a human geographer and director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which seeks to help leaders communicate more effectively and increase awareness of the risks and opportunities associated with climate change.

In an April 2019 publication, Leiserowitz and his colleagues reported that about seven in 10 Americans think global warming is happening. Daly attributes this positive shift in awareness to increasing personal experience with climate change. “One of the things that the research bears out is that as people are exposed to more extreme weather events, something that they personally experienced, they're much more willing to entertain the notion that climate change is both real and something that they need to address,” she says. “It becomes harder and harder to deny.”