Cod and Climate Change

This chapter introduces some historic background and the scales and processes being investigated before going into details about the impacts of climate on individual fish and populations of cod; their growth, survival, recruitment and surplus production. Cod stocks in colder areas have declined at greater rates than have warm‐water stocks and warm‐water stocks are more resilient to fishing pressure.

The history of cod and cod fishing at Greenland is a rich source of insight into the impacts that climate change can have on the population structure, migrations and range of the fish and the livelihoods of fishing communities. In the context of fish population dynamics and fisheries management there is a need to understand the effects of environmental variability at many timescales, including seasonal and inter‐annual variability as well as long‐term, multi‐decadal changes.

The chapter also explores a few aspects of the climate of the North Atlantic that are relevant to impacts on cod populations