In a changing climate, there is an imperative to build coupled social‐ecological systems—including fisheries—that can withstand or adapt to climate stressors. Although resilience theory identifies system attributes that supposedly confer resilience, these attributes have rarely been clearly defined, mechanistically explained, nor tested and applied to inform fisheries governance. Here, we develop and apply a comprehensive resilience framework to examine fishery systems across (a) ecological, (b) socio‐economic and (c) governance dimensions using five resilience domains: assets, flexibility, organization, learning and agency. We distil and define 38 attributes that confer climate resilience from a coupled literature‐ and expert‐driven approach, describe how they apply to fisheries and provide illustrative examples of resilience attributes in action. Our synthesis highlights that the directionality and mechanism of these attributes depend on the specific context, capacities, and scale of the focal fishery system and associated stressors, and we find evidence of interdependencies among attributes. Overall, however, we find few studies that test resilience attributes in fisheries across all parts of the system, with most examples focussing on the ecological dimension. As such, meaningful quantification of the attributes’ contributions to resilience remains a challenge. Our synthesis and holistic framework represent a starting point for critical application of resilience concepts to fisheries social‐ecological systems.

Both the ecological and social dimensions of fisheries are being affected by climate change. As a result, policymakers, managers, scientists and fishing communities are seeking guidance on how to holistically build resilience to climate change. Numerous studies have highlighted key attributes of resilience in fisheries, yet concrete examples that explicitly link these attributes to social‐ecological outcomes are lacking. To better understand climate resilience, we assembled 18 case studies spanning ecological, socio‐economic, governance and geographic contexts. Using a novel framework for evaluating 38 resilience attributes, the case studies were systematically assessed to understand how attributes enable or inhibit resilience to a given climate stressor. We found population abundance, learning capacity, and responsive governance were the most important attributes for conferring resilience, with ecosystem connectivity, place attachment, and accountable governance scoring the strongest across the climate‐resilient fisheries. We used these responses to develop an attribute typology that describes robust sources of resilience, actionable priority attributes and attributes that are case specific or require research. We identified five fishery archetypes to guide stakeholders as they set long‐term goals and prioritize actions to improve resilience. Lastly, we found evidence for two pathways to resilience: (1) building ecological assets and strengthening communities, which we observed in rural and small‐scale fisheries, and (2) building economic assets and improving effective governance, which was demonstrated in urban and wealthy fisheries. Our synthesis presents a novel framework that can be directly applied to identify approaches, pathways and actionable levers for improving climate resilience in fishery systems.

Limited data on the spatial, environmental, and human dimensions of small‐scale fisheries hinder conservation planning, so the incorporation of fishers' local ecological knowledge may be a valuable way to fill data gaps while legitimizing management decisions. In Peru, vulnerable and poorly assessed juvenile smooth hammerhead sharks ( Sphyrna zygaena ) are the most commonly caught shark species in a small‐scale drift gillnet fishery. We conducted semistructured interviews with 87 hammerhead fishers in three major Peruvian ports to elucidate the spatiotemporal niche of the hammerhead fishery and environmental drivers of juvenile hammerhead catch. We also built a biophysical model of hammerhead distribution that correlated remotely sensed environmental variables with a spatially explicit fishery observer dataset. Overall, we found a consensus between fishers' knowledge and species distribution modeling. Sea surface temperature and chlorophyll‐a emerged as important environmental drivers of juvenile hammerhead catch, with both fishers' knowledge and the biophysical model identifying similar habitat preferences (~20–23°C and log chl‐a >−1.6 mg/m ³ ). Participatory mapping of fishing grounds also corresponded to the spatiotemporal patterns of predicted hammerhead distribution. This study points to the utility of combining fishers' knowledge and biophysical modeling for spatial, temporal, and/or dynamic management of these sharks in Peru and in other data‐poor fisheries globally.

Understanding and solving complex ocean conservation problems requires cooperation not just among scientific disciplines but also across sectors. A recently published survey that probed research priorities of marine scientists, when provided to ocean stakeholders, revealed some agreement on priorities but also illuminated key differences. Ocean acidification, cumulative impacts, bycatch effects, and restoration effectiveness were in the top 10 priorities for scientists and stakeholder groups. Significant priority differences were that scientists favored research questions about ocean acidification and marine protected areas; policymakers prioritized questions about habitat restoration, bycatch, and precaution; and fisheries sector resource users called for the inclusion of local ecological knowledge in policymaking. These results quantitatively demonstrate how different stakeholder groups approach ocean issues and highlight the need to incorporate other types of knowledge in the codesign of solutions-oriented research, which may facilitate cross-sectoral collaboration.

Fisheries are critically important for nutrition, food security, livelihoods, and culture of hundreds of millions of people globally. As climate impacts on ocean ecosystems increase, policy-makers are asking critical questions about how to implement reforms at local and national levels to reach goals around improving performance of management systems, sustainability, equity, and resilience to climate change. These goals can be achieved by enhancing the structure, function, and biodiversity of marine ecosystems as climate change proceeds, together with adaptive, sustainable management. However, resource, technical, and governance capacities vary widely across management systems. These capacities will determine, in part, the best policy approaches to build resilience and overcome systemic challenges to equity and sustainability to stressors such as climate change. To illuminate how fisheries resilience can be improved within the constraints imposed by these capacity limits, we present case studies from Myanmar, Belize, Peru, and Iceland, which offer a spectrum of capacity conditions to explore social–ecological resilience challenges and solutions. Using a set of nine social–ecological resilience criteria, we examine each system’s attributes that may confer or undermine resilience and explore interactions between them. We use this assessment to identify policy approaches that can help build resilience in each particular context.

As climate change shifts marine species distribution and abundance worldwide, projecting local changes over decadal scales may be an adaptive strategy for managers and industry. In Iceland, one of the top fish-producing nations globally, long-term monitoring enables model simulations of groundfish species habitat distribution. We used generalized additive models to characterize suitable thermal habitat for 51 fish species in Iceland's waters. We projected changes in suitable thermal habitat by midcentury with an ensemble of five general circulation models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Program 6 (CMIP6) and NOAA (CM2.6) and two scenarios (SSP 5-8.5 and SSP 2-4.5). We found a general northward shift in suitable thermal habitat distribution, with variable regional dynamics among species. Species thermal bias index was a weak predictor of projected thermal habitat change, with warmer-water species more likely to see increases in thermal habitat and southern warm-edge range expansions. While these results isolate the effects of future changes in temperature, providing an indication of suitable thermal habitat, low model explanatory power suggests that additional variables may improve distribution projections. Such projections might serve as guideposts to inform long-term management decisions about regional and species-specific suitability for Iceland's fisheries, infrastructure investment, and risk evaluation under climate change.