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Marine animal biomass is expected to decrease in the 21st century due to climate driven changes in ocean environmental conditions. Previous studies suggest that the magnitude of the decline in primary production on apex predators could be amplified through the trophodynamics of marine food webs, leading to larger decreases in the biomass of predators relative to the decrease in primary production, a mechanism called trophic amplification. We compared relative changes in producer and consumer biomass or production in the global ocean to assess the extent of trophic amplification. We used simulations from nine marine ecosystem models (MEMs) from the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Models Intercomparison Project forced by two Earth System Models under the high greenhouse gas emissions Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP5-8.5) and a scenario of no fishing. Globally, total consumer biomass is projected to decrease by 16.7 ± 9.5% more than net primary production (NPP) by 2090-2099 relative to 1995-2014, with substantial variations among MEMs and regions. Total consumer biomass is projected to decrease almost everywhere in the ocean (80% of the world's oceans) in the model ensemble. In 40% of the world's oceans, consumer biomass was projected to decrease more than NPP. Additionally, in another 36% of the world's oceans consumer biomass is expected to decrease even as projected NPP increases. By analysing the biomass response within food webs in available MEMs, we found that model parameters and structures contributed to more complex responses than a consistent amplification of climate impacts of higher trophic levels. Our study provides additional insights into the ecological mechanisms that will impact marine ecosystems, thereby informing model and scenario development., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Luzinais et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Young generations are severely threatened by climate change.

Projections of climate change impacts on marine ecosystems have revealed long-term declines in global marine animal biomass and unevenly distributed impacts on fisheries. Here we apply an enhanced suite of global marine ecosystem models from the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project (Fish-MIP), forced by new-generation Earth system model outputs from Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), to provide insights into how projected climate change will affect future ocean ecosystems. Compared with the previous generation CMIP5-forced Fish-MIP ensemble, the new ensemble ecosystem simulations show a greater decline in mean global ocean animal biomass under both strong-mitigation and high-emissions scenarios due to elevated warming, despite greater uncertainty in net primary production in the high-emissions scenario. Regional shifts in the direction of biomass changes highlight the continued and urgent need to reduce uncertainty in the projected responses of marine ecosystems to climate change to help support adaptation planning., Competing Interests: Competing interestsThe authors declare no competing interests., (© The Author(s) 2021.)

While the physical dimensions of climate change are now routinely assessed through multimodel intercomparisons, projected impacts on the global ocean ecosystem generally rely on individual models with a specific set of assumptions. To address these single-model limitations, we present standardized ensemble projections from six global marine ecosystem models forced with two Earth system models and four emission scenarios with and without fishing. We derive average biomass trends and associated uncertainties across the marine food web. Without fishing, mean global animal biomass decreased by 5% (±4% SD) under low emissions and 17% (±11% SD) under high emissions by 2100, with an average 5% decline for every 1 °C of warming. Projected biomass declines were primarily driven by increasing temperature and decreasing primary production, and were more pronounced at higher trophic levels, a process known as trophic amplification. Fishing did not substantially alter the effects of climate change. Considerable regional variation featured strong biomass increases at high latitudes and decreases at middle to low latitudes, with good model agreement on the direction of change but variable magnitude. Uncertainties due to variations in marine ecosystem and Earth system models were similar. Ensemble projections performed well compared with empirical data, emphasizing the benefits of multimodel inference to project future outcomes. Our results indicate that global ocean animal biomass consistently declines with climate change, and that these impacts are amplified at higher trophic levels. Next steps for model development include dynamic scenarios of fishing, cumulative human impacts, and the effects of management measures on future ocean biomass trends., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2019 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.)

Global impact models represent process-level understanding of how natural and human systems may be affected by climate change. Their projections are used in integrated assessments of climate change. Here we test, for the first time, systematically across many important systems, how well such impact models capture the impacts of extreme climate conditions. Using the 2003 European heat wave and drought as a historical analogue for comparable events in the future, we find that a majority of models underestimate the extremeness of impacts in important sectors such as agriculture, terrestrial ecosystems, and heat-related human mortality, while impacts on water resources and hydropower are overestimated in some river basins; and the spread across models is often large. This has important implications for economic assessments of climate change impacts that rely on these models. It also means that societal risks from future extreme events may be greater than previously thought.

Fisheries and aquaculture make a crucial contribution to global food security, nutrition and livelihoods. However, the UN Sustainable Development Goals separate marine and terrestrial food production sectors and ecosystems. To sustainably meet increasing global demands for fish, the interlinkages among goals within and across fisheries, aquaculture and agriculture sectors must be recognized and addressed along with their changing nature. Here, we assess and highlight development challenges for fisheries-dependent countries based on analyses of interactions and trade-offs between goals focusing on food, biodiversity and climate change. We demonstrate that some countries are likely to face double jeopardies in both fisheries and agriculture sectors under climate change. The strategies to mitigate these risks will be context-dependent, and will need to directly address the trade-offs among Sustainable Development Goals, such as halting biodiversity loss and reducing poverty. Countries with low adaptive capacity but increasing demand for food require greater support and capacity building to transition towards reconciling trade-offs. Necessary actions are context-dependent and include effective governance, improved management and conservation, maximizing societal and environmental benefits from trade, increased equitability of distribution and innovation in food production, including continued development of low input and low impact aquaculture.

The light reflected by an uncoated Fabry-Perot etalon presents dark rings which give a very sensitive measurement of the variations of the return optical path in the etalon. By measuring the diameters of these rings as a function of the etalon temperature T, we get a sensitive measurement of the derivative dn/dT of the index of refraction n. We have made this experiment with a fused silica etalon and we have achieved a 2% relative uncertainty on dn/dT, comparable to the uncertainty of the best experiments.