During the past decade there has been considerable speculation about the possible consequences of a global warming of the atmosphere for terrestrial ecosystems. One of the latest surveys of such impacts was undertaken by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at the request of the US Congress in its search for policy options with respect to the possible anthropogenically induced climate change (US EPA, 1989). While freshwater ecosystems and two estuarine ecosystems (Apalachicola Bay in Florida and San Francisco Bay in California, USA) were included in this recent EPA survey, marine ecosystems were not. A more recent assessment undertaken by Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 1991) generated some speculation about possible climate change impacts on fish population and on aquatic life.

This volume, Climate Variability, Climate Change, and Fisheries, addresses the potential implications for fisheries and societies of the regional impacts of a global warming of the atmosphere. Fisheries case studies were selected for investigation of the responses to changes in their environment. While most of these changes related to biological factors (that is, changes in the abundance of a fish population), some case studies related to abiotic factors, focusing on changes in the availability of fish (that is, a loss of access to commercially exploited fish stocks because of unilateral extensions by nations of their fishing jurisdictions).