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Throughout the western part of North America, key salmon habitat areas are now provably hotter and drier than they were just 50 years ago.
Worse, all the most recent scientific projections tell us that the future climate of the West is likely to become even hotter and dryer as once-projected global climate changes moves from theory to reality. Obviously this puts the west coast’s major Pacific salmon runs, long a powerhouse of our fishing industry, in deeper peril from California to Alaska.
At the current rate of increase, the Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide (the greenhouse gas that is most pervasive, from fossil fuels) is expected to double by the end of the 21st Century. Already, the IPCC noted, atmospheric abundance of all greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) now far exceeds pre-industrial levels going back at least 650,000 years.
Not surprisingly, accompanying this buildup of greenhouse gases has been a worldwide increase in average temperatures. Eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the 12 warmest years on meteorological record (which began in 1850). Furthermore, direct temperature observations from multiple sources show that not only is the world getting warmer on average, but that the rate of warming is also now increasing. All these observations are consistent with global warming projections, but are now observed fact rather than informed speculation. Our most pessimistic climate models are quickly becoming reality.
What prior globally-based climate change projections cannot show very well is just what these broad climate changes mean to a specific region of the globe – like northern California through Alaska.
What does this mean specifically to the west coast? Recent studies focusing only on the North American west coast do show that most of the west coast of the U.S. and British Columbia has already been getting both hotter and drier throughout most of the last several decades -- including all the regions in which Pacific salmon still occur.
For instance, a report co-authored by the multi-government Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), titled “Hotter and Drier: The West’s Changed Climate,” published March 2008, took a purely statistical approach. In other words, instead of looking forward through projections and models, the authors looked backwards at actual weather data for the last 100 years to see if there was a statistically significant trend. There clearly was -- toward hotter and drier.
Worse, the numbers show that the Western U.S. is both warming up and drying out faster than the rest of the U.S. and most of the world. When compared to the 20th century average, these studies found that the West has experienced an increase in average temperatures during the last five years that is 70 percent greater than the world as a whole.
In other words, global climate change is already hitting the west coast of North America harder than almost anywhere else. This includes Alaska, where glaciers and permafrost are now melting, as well as the Arctic icecap disappearing, at rates never before known in human history. Alaskan salmon runs are also seeing higher incidence of warm-water fish diseases virtually unknown in Alaska before. These are also traceable to overall warming of northern waters.
Another important study was just completed by the Scripps Institution, and published in the prestigious publication Science on February 2008 (Human-Induced Changes in the Hydrology of the Western United States – see references below). The authors quantified the fact that the western U.S. has gotten both hotter and drier, but were also able to determine that up to 60 percent of those changes since 1950 were human-induced and not normal and expected fluctuations.
We have written about the challenge global climate change presents to our fishing industry before (see FN March 2007, “Global Climate Change and the Fishing Industry,” www.pcffa.org/fn-mar07.htm), particularly looking at strategies our industry should use to adapt to these changes over time. However, that overview was more generic. Let’s now look specifically at the impact on west coast salmon – and what should be done to minimize that impact.
As always, even with something as widespread as global climate change, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Responding effectively to global climate change takes only a small societal investment today, but that investment will likely prevent major fishing disasters and industry collapses (perhaps permanent ones) in the future.
What this article presents is one possible road map for making those wise social investments in salmon as a public resource to make sure these resources continue to serve Humanity – and fishing industry – needs into the foreseeable future.
Warming regional conditions have probably been a contributing factor in the recent multiple salmon collapses in the lower 48 states in the following ways: (1) reduced snow packs, resulting in smaller than normal summer and fall stream flows in nearly every salmon river system; (2) increased average stream temperatures (salmon die at temperatures above 20 Centigrade (70 F.)); (3) deteriorating water quality in key salmon habitat areas triggered by temperature rises; (4) adverse ocean conditions caused by shifting ocean currents and too much dissolved CO2, including increased ocean acidification and the growth of an unprecedented giant “dead zone” offshore Oregon. These impacts are in addition to already existing problems with loss of historic habitat and blockage by dams.
In the California Central Valley, the region is still suffering widespread drought. Less total rainfall to the river, plus record water diversions since 2005 (leaving less water in the river), spelled ecosystem disaster for a whole range of species, including chinook salmon. This water shortage is a major contributing cause of the 2008 Central Valley salmon collapse.
In the Klamath River, documented changes in climate over the past 50 years show increased water temperatures throughout the system. The negative impacts of four obsolete hydropower dams in the Klamath owned by PacifiCorp has compounded all these water quality problems.
In the Columbia Basin, reports by the Northwest Power Planning Council’s Independent Science Advisory Board (see references) also document higher summer stream temperatures and changes in hydrology adverse to salmon survival. Also, long-standing water competition is heating up again, with several initiatives progressing that would take yet more water out of the Columbia River, even though 40 percent of its flow has already been lost and this loss is contributing to salmon declines.
Not surprisingly, there are ESA-list salmonid stocks (coho, chinook and steelhead) in all three of these river systems that are on the verge of extinction.
Finally, all these many inland problems salmon face due to loss of habitat, river dewatering and dams are compounded by adverse ocean conditions that are no longer within normal variability, but being increasingly skewed by global climate changes.
In spite of the above litany of horrors, there is still much that can be -- and is being --done to protect valuable salmon resources against the impacts of global warming.
The basic principle of salmon restoration is this: global warming and other factors beyond our immediate control are creating additional stresses on salmon runs that are already under considerable cumulative stress. The best way to respond is to reduce those stresses that are within our power to reduce. Thus the cumulative stresses will be reduced as best we can, and salmon will be better able to survive those factors we have no control over, including both natural variation and over-riding climate change.
With all this in mind, here is my best attempt at a “TEN POINT PROGRAM” for a bountiful salmon future:
(1) Make Wild Salmon A Societal Priority: Unless there is widespread public buy-in for the need to protect Pacific salmon runs, the public will never support the public investment necessary to keep these runs thriving.
This means that we have to continually educate the public on the importance of having abundant natural (not aquacultured) salmon runs harvested by local fishing families that live in and support local coastal communities. The SalmonAid event this summer, for instance, was part of this effort to get the public to really understand why having abundant wild salmon runs matters – and why imported farm fish are no substitute.
Especially we have to continue efforts to convince the public that protecting and restoring ocean-caught salmon runs and their habitat is an economic investment, not an economic cost. It is an investment in west coast jobs and communities that will pay economic dividend forever far greater than its expense. Buying imported farm fish, on the other hand, just exports those jobs and dollars overseas.
(2) Create The Political Will For Change: The reason a supportive public is vitally important to us is that without public support it is nearly impossible to change the political – and currently salmon-hostile -- status quo.
Political “leaders” are all too often followers of public opinion.. Many are spineless in facing up to politically well organized industries who profit from the destruction of salmon habitat (you know who they are). Unless there is a countervailing social movement for salmon restoration, lead by economic interests just as important and well organized (meaning us) as those who oppose salmon protection, political leaders become like deer in the headlights and freeze into paralysis.
Unfortunately the current land and water use policy status quo is moving the whole region toward salmon extinction. Creating salmon-friendly alternatives will take major political power to force major political change.
This also means creating powerful political alliances with sportfishing, conservation, and other perhaps unlikely groups that become far more politically powerful working together than separately. Building such coalitions is not always easy. Yet nothing creates alliances like a common threat – and the accelerating threat to west coast salmon runs and the watersheds they come from derives from many sources, thus creating many strange alliances.
Creating political will for change also means getting better organized politically as fishermen and as an industry. Unfortunately, the fishing industry as a whole is sorely handicapped by not having a national voice for commercial fishermen in Congress. Nothing like PCFFA exists anywhere else on the east coast or Gulf. Efforts to create a US-wide fishermen’s political organization, the Commercial Fishermen of America (www.cfafish.org) is a good step in that direction that deserves full support.
(3) Keep More Water In Depleted Salmon Rivers: Every major salmon river system has suffered from water diversions. In most, like the Klamath and the California Central Valley, agricultural diversions know no bounds and continue to grow – fostered by current government policies – at the expense of salmon runs which need water in the river just as much as agribusiness does in the field.
Efforts are underway to put more water back into the Klamath River through a negotiated settlement, and the California Central Valley water plan supposed to protect salmon runs (but which didn’t) was recently thrown out of U.S. District Court as “arbitrary and capricious” just days after the Pacific Fishery Management Council had to close down most of the west coast fishery because of the Central Valley salmon collapse. By Court Order that massive water plan now has to be rewritten with salmon protections included.
Water diversions everywhere need to be capped and certain bottom-line minimum instream flows legally protected as public trust water rights in each salmon-producing river. Oregon at least has a legal mechanism for creating and protecting in-streams for fish (albeit a weak one). Remarkably, California does not -- though there are efforts to create one (through AB 2121 and related rules) in certain northern California river systems. The California Central Valley Improvement Act of 1992 (Title 34 of P.L. 102-575) also calls for 800,000 acre-feet of water to be reserved in-river to protect the Central Valley’s salmon runs, though most of that is still tied up in court.
More often it has been the Endangered Species Act, however, that has driven much overdue west coast water reforms and put minimum in-stream flows back into water starved rivers. Unfortunately, the ESA is a poor tool at best, triggered only once a salmon run is close to extinction, when it is often too late to recover the run. We need better and more proactive legal mechanisms to create and then protect minimum instream flows for salmon in every west coast state and British Columbia.
As west coast human populations grow, there will only be more competition for increasingly scarce water resources, not less. We have only a few more years to win these battles for minimum instream flows before population pressure overwhelms these efforts and dewaters more rivers. In the meantime, as in industry we should support long-term water solutions, including serious conservation efforts. California, for instance, is one of the most wasteful water users in the world. Much can be done to reduce this future water competition through conservation alone.
(4) Take Down Stupid Dams In Stupid Places: There are more than 70,000 dams in the US – one built for each day since the signing of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. Yet only about 10 percent of these often-obsolete dams still serve any real function. Most, however, block their river systems and do a great deal of ecological damage.
Many dams in the west are no longer needed. Where those dams block salmon access to once-occupied salmon rearing and spawning habitat they are clearly candidates for removal, especially if any of those salmon runs are ESA-listed. Examples include several Klamath River dams, the four lower Snake River Dams, and several others. PCFFA has been involved in these and other dam removal campaigns for many years, with considerable success.
The good news is that several of these salmonid-killing dams have or are about to come down, including: the Savage Rapids and Elk Creek Dams on Oregon’s Rogue River (the best salmon producing river on Oregon’s coast); the Elwha and Glines Dams on Washington’s Puget Sound; Condit Dam, in eastern Washington; the Matilija Dam in southern California.
Fishermen should be in the front lines in efforts to remove any dam that blocks available salmon habitat.
(5) Restore As Much Salmon Habitat As Possible. PCFFA has been engaged in salmon habitat protection and restoration efforts since its beginning more than 30 years ago. Both PCFFA and its affiliate organization, the Institute for Fisheries Resources (IFR), continue in this tradition. Millions of acres in the west coast have better salmon protections today from harmful logging, pesticides, water pollution and over-grazing as a result of these joint IFR/PCFFA salmon protection activities. Many other fishing groups, both sport and commercial, have joined us in these efforts.
“Protect the best, restore the rest” is the best rule of thumb here. Wherever there is existing salmon habitat, the practice should be to “do no more harm” and to foster land management policies that provide permanent protection. Where habitat has already been degraded, it should be restored to as good a state of biological health as possible as soon as possible, and also protected from future harm.
(6) Maximize Salmonid Range And Diversity: Salmon survived for hundreds of thousands of years through several Ice Ages because they were widely distributed geographically and were able to reoccupy a diversity of habitats because of their great genetic diversity. Without both factors – wide distribution and maximum genetic diversity – one localized disaster or disease outbreak can lead to a whole run’s total extinction.
Protecting and expanding both ranges and genetic diversity implies not only cleaning up damaged habitat to allow recolonization (as well as reconnection) to areas historically occupied (like above impassable dams), but also allows them to better adapt as a species to changing environmental conditions. Some stocks, like those in their southernmost ranges and in normally warmer inland basins like the Klamath, are better adapted to warm weather conditions than other stocks. Maintaining the full range of these key genetic survival traits is, of course, their key to survival in a changing world.
(7) Defend And Institutionalize Every Gain: Every habitat or instream flow gain salmon advocates make can be reversed, and plenty of politically powerful interests would like to do just that. Every gain in court now has to be defended in Congress. Every gain in Congress has to be defended against inept or hostile federal Administrations (like the present one) who want to do as little as possible or just ignore the problem.
Most important, remember that laws that protect salmon today can be changed. As the English common law saying goes, “No one is safe in his castle when Parliament is in session.” Important environmental laws like NEPA, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act – laws with teeth – are under constant attack in Congress by industries who see them only as barriers to profiteering.
We must also create new institutions equal to the scope of the salmon restoration problem. All too often a 50-year salmon restoration plan must depend on one-year Congressional or Legislative appropriations, opening the program up each year to political efforts by opponents to kill it. Unfortunately, biology does not function on a political time-scale, and science should not be trumped by politics.
Permanently funded, long-term salmon restoration and protection mechanisms that are independent of politics do exist. Examples are the Oregon Plan for Salmon and Steelhead which, in spite of flaws, has been implement by statute and has not only mobilized public opinion in favor of local salmon habitat restoration efforts in Oregon, but also is separately funded through various mechanisms, including receiving statutorily dedicated portions of lottery money and salmon license plate revenues. Another example is California’s Salmon Stamp Program, which was created by PCFFA many years ago and is funded by the fishing industry outside of Cal. Fish and Game, and which pays for many salmon habitat restoration and other salmon protections in northern California.
And finally, we must always remember that policies come and go with each Administration, but formal Administrative Rules are harder to change, and statutes are the hardest of all to change. The more we can cement salmon restorations into law, the better we will be able to defend them. Examples are the Trinity River Restoration Act (P.L. 98-541), the Klamath River Basin Fisheries Restoration Act (P.L. 99-552, amended by P.L. 102-570), the California Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA) (Title 34 of P.L. 102-575) and the (as yet unpassed) San Joaquin Settlement Act (H.R. 24 and S. 27) which are support by a Court settlement.
As water gets scarcer in the west and competition for that water gets tougher, the fishing industry needs the most defensible positions possible to keep these watershed reforms intact.
(8) Remember The Bigger Picture: Salmon are affected by numerous environmental problems, including inland habitat problems faced by no other harvestable marine species.
This means that in order to defend salmon watersheds, fishermen’s organization need to engage in all the following arenas in addition to at-sea management under the Magnuson Act: the Clean Water Act (air pollution and global warming); the Clean Water Act (water pollution); the Endangered Species Act (ESA); National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA); Oil Pollution Control Act; the Mining Act; several federal forest and rangeland management statutes protecting salmon watersheds; various international trade issues affecting salmon aquaculture; a host of state equivalents of all of the above, and much more.
It is especially important, on the issue of climate change, that fishermen’s organizations provide political support for all efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. In some instances this means changes (often modest ones) in existing technologies, such as increasing automobile engine fuel efficiency. Other changes may require more effort, including necessary changes in existing energy policy strategies.
Clean Air Act, non-polluting alternative energy development and engine fuel efficiency standards may not seem like political fights the fishing industry has a stake in. However, the impact of global climate change will fall very hard on our industry and our coastal ports unless greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control and then soon afterwards greatly reduced. This makes those policy fights important to our industry. It is always far cheaper to prevent a disaster from happening than to clean one up after it occurs.
(9) Accept No Substitutes For Real Restoration: Scientists have repeatedly shown that Nature can make salmon faster, cheaper and with better survival skills than any government bureaucracy. This means we should continue to insist on real restoration of natural river systems and not settle for cheap substitutes.
Don’t get me wrong here. I am not opposed to the proper use of hatcheries, nor do I speak against them generically in any way. Indeed, hatcheries are often necessary and useful tools to maintain salmon production in many places because that is all that is left of a once productive river, especially in the California Central Valley where many once-productive salmon rivers have now been irrevocably destroyed, dammed or dried up.
We are also, as an industry, very hatchery-dependent. More than 80 percent of all the salmon harvested in the oceans are originally from hatcheries. In fact, fishery managers make extra efforts to have us target hatchery fish instead of depleted wild stocks, and that is as it should be. Weak stocks or ESA-listed stocks should be avoided whenever possible. Hatchery stocks are now far more abundant, and this helps take pressure off the weakest wild stocks.
But there are also practical reasons for reducing our industry’s reliance on salmon hatcheries – for one thing, hatchery programs are expensive and many are being defunded in these times of state budget crises. Hatchery production can also fail, through disease or mechanical failure or any of a number of other reasons. The more we as an industry allow ourselves to be dependent on those hatcheries for our harvest, the more vulnerable we are to budget cutbacks and the more we risk major economic loses when a hatchery program fails or is closed for any reason.
Nevertheless, where hatcheries are the only available alternative (e.g., below an impassable dam) hatchery mangers should be pushed, shoved and helped toward modernization and maximization of the economic benefits from these facilities. The better these existing production hatcheries can function the better for our industry. Many problems with often very out of date hatcheries can be corrected through modernization.
But where there is hope for restoring a healthy natural river system, and wild salmon recolonization can be accomplished, it is almost always better for the long-term health of the stocks we depend upon to restore that river system than to accept yet another hatchery as a substitute for a healthy river. A hatchery can only imitate river conditions, not replace them.
Remember also that even hatchery-raised fish spend only a short part of their lives in a protected hatchery environment. Eventually they too must navigate both ways – out to sea and back again – within a river. Thus both hatchery-origin and wild-spawned salmon need healthy rivers to survive. A toxic or dewatered river kills hatchery-origin and wild fish alike.
(10) Don’t Let Them Do Anything Stupid In the Meantime: There are also always plenty of crack-brained ideas out there about how we can “have our cake and eat it too,” meaning somehow to provide for healthy salmon runs but still cut the hell out of our forests, pollute our rivers or dewater whole watersheds in the name of “development.” Most of these “short cuts” to salmon restoration are pure bunk, so don’t be fooled. Salmon need, and will always need, healthy unpolluted rivers with certain minimum cold water flows to survive.
Perhaps one of the most important things fishermen can do in their Legislatures and in Congress is keep terrible ideas from becoming law. There are serious proposals for new dams we do not need but which would destroy yet more salmon habitat, for boondoggles like the “Peripheral Canal” in California, for loosening controls on already highly destructive forestry practices, for giving away yet more water rights in over-appropriated river basins, and for exempting yet more commercial agriculture from pollution control laws – all in the name of “balancing competing interests.”
Frankly, commercial fishermen should be sick to death of this kind of “balancing.” In the name of achieving “balance” among competing interests the west coast’s once abundant salmon runs have now been nearly wiped out, and our industry reduced to mere shreds of what it once was. In the lower 48 west coast states, for instance, we have already lost more than 80 percent of both our salmon runs and our fleet, nearly two dozen major runs are on the verge of extinction, and once-prosperous salmon ports are now close to collapse. How much more “balancing” can fishermen take before they are balanced out of existence?
Don’t let our political leaders sacrifice your future yet again – keep them to the task of real salmon restoration and the resurgence of salmon fishing as an economic mainstay of our west coast fishing industry.
Global climate change is a serious and looming problem, make no mistake, but my belief is that we should look at the whole issue as a creative challenge rather than cause for despair. There is, in fact, much that we can do about this issue as noted above, both locally and globally, and long-term solutions will come much easier with appropriate investments now rather than later.
The Bush Administration has been far behind the rest of the world, and indeed the rest of the United States, in responding to climate change problem. Because of local organizing on this issue the states of California, Oregon and Washington are already taking giant steps forward on their own, as is nearly every other country in the world other than the U.S. government, to reduce the production of greenhouse gases and adapt to oncoming climate changes. We should support and take part in all those regional efforts.
In early 2009 we also will have a new federal Administration – whatever the outcome of the upcoming Presidential elections – that will be both much more proactive and more responsive on global climate change issues than the Bush Administration ever has been. Both Senator Obama and Senator McCain have been Congressional leaders in these efforts.
Here in the U.S. we have most of the means to tackle this problem – what we lack most often (particularly on the federal level) is the political will. Yet thanks to the organizing efforts of fishermen and their allies everywhere, the current salmon crisis is being turned around into a campaign to bring these runs back to full health, in spite of obstacles like climate change.
Remember: Once fishermen are organized, our voices are usually heard and the politicians respond. Once organized, in fact, we are unstoppable.
Glen Spain is the Northwest Regional Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA) as well as Northwest Regional Director and Salmon Program Director for the Institute for Fisheries Resources (IFR), working out of their joint PCFFA/IFR Northwest Regional Office, reachable at PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR 97440-3370, (541)689-2000, Fax: (541)689-2500. He can also be reached via email at: fish1ifr@aol.com. PCFFA’s web site is at: www.pcffa.org. IFR's web site is at: www.ifrfish.org.