Building Resource and Community Resilience to Rapidly Changing Oceans

Climate change is driving rapid changes in U.S. marine and Great Lakes ecosystems. The impacts range from devastating marine heatwaves to shifts in the distribution and abundance of commercial and recreational fish stocks. These changes are already impacting these important resources and the people, businesses, and coastal communities that depend on them.

NOAA Fisheries is committed to helping resource managers, businesses and coastal communities build resilience and adapt to changing ocean environments. To be successful, we need up-to-date information on what's coming, what's at risk, and how best to prepare and respond.

NOAA's Climate, Ecosystems, and Fisheries Initiative (CEFI) is designed to address these needs and transform how we approach and respond to changing ocean and Great Lakes conditions. CEFI is a cross-NOAA effort to build a nationwide decision support system to help reduce impacts and increase resilience. For the first time, NOAA will regularly provide robust forecasts of future ocean ecosystem conditions, information on what's at risk, and advice on best strategies for resilience and adaptation.

"The CEFI is the product of extraordinary cross-NOAA collaboration to meet the urgent need for action in the face of rapidly changing oceans," says Cisco Werner, NOAA Fisheries Chief Science Advisor and Director of Scientific Programs. "Working with many partners, the CEFI System will provide critical information to help the nation's fisheries and fishing communities adapt to a changing environment."

The CEFI system will regularly deliver powerful new early warnings, forecasts, and longer term projections of future ocean and Great Lakes conditions. At the core are high-resolution regional ocean models developed by NOAA scientists and partners at NOAA Research's oceanographic and physical sciences laboratories . Thanks to advances in our understanding of the earth's climate and ocean systems, these models are now able to produce robust, high-resolution, short-term forecasts and longer term projections of likely future ocean conditions.

Assessing risks and identifying actions to increase resilience requires expertise from across NOAA, as well as close collaboration between the producers and users of this information. To help fill this role, the CEFI system includes regional decision support teams made up of interdisciplinary scientists from NOAA Fisheries science centers, the National Centers for Coastal and Ocean Science , and NOAA Research's Great Lakes Environmental Laboratory . These teams will use these new forecasts and projections of future ocean conditions to:

• Develop future outlooks of ecosystems and fisheries
• Determine what's at risk
• Support climate-informed decision-making

Inflation Reduction Act Makes it Possible

After years of design, development, and testing, NOAA is now beginning to build out the initial CEFI system in all six U.S. marine regions and the Great Lakes thanks to funding from the Inflation Reduction Act . We are building on NOAA strengths and existing efforts nationwide, including historic advancements in climate-ocean modeling and interdisciplinary pilot projects in four regions:

"Construction of the initial CEFI system is underway, including ocean forecasts, ecosystem outlooks, and other products to support climate-informed decision making in each region," says Sean Corson, Director of NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) . "Our goal is to demonstrate the utility of a fully operational CEFI system to decision makers in many sectors."

Experts Agree on CEFI Path Forward

More than 130 experts from across NOAA gathered in May 2024 for the first-ever CEFI summit. The summit brought together builders and users of what will ultimately be a nationwide suite of regional decision support systems.

Bill Tweit, vice chair of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council noted that "Climate change is hitting hard and fast. Having CEFI now is critical and something that we can actually point to to say, 'Here's a roadmap for addressing this challenge, and here's why we put these resources into it.'" Tweit was one of the internal and external experts asked to provide feedback on the design and buildout process of the CEFI system.

The summit included regionally focused discussions for identification of challenges, opportunities, and ways to increase codevelopment of decision support products with target users. Two key needs emerged as common to all regions:

• Climate-informed projections of future species distributions
• Increased social and economic information to help identify strategies for resilience, and assist coastal communities prepare for and respond to changing conditions

Since the summit, the regional CEFI teams have expanded to include additional internal and external partners such as NOAA Fisheries regional offices , the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries , the Integrated Ocean Observing System , and regional fishery management councils .

"One of the exciting things about CEFI is that it is a truly integrated initiative," says Michelle McClure, director of NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory . "Multiple line offices and many programs have come together to do something really important-in fact, transformational in many ways-to advance climate-ready decision making."

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