Impact of Climate Change in Marine Resources, Their Habitats, and Associated Socio-Economic Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Marine ecosystems provide humans with many goods and services. Understanding how the environment and climate change affect marine systems is recognized as one of the major scientific challenges in the coming decades. Over millions of years, species have developed resilience to environmental conditions. Additionally, they have to gain the intrinsic capacity to adapt to natural condition shifts imposed by continuous changes in the environment. Global projections have been made regarding many aspects of climate change in the marine environment (e.g., SST, pH) and their communities, population or particular economically relevant taxonomic groups. However, it remains unknown how these factors affect processes at the local scale, as the nature of these processes differs across areas, societies, etc.

The evidence that CC factors cause long-term and large-scale variability in marine systems is growing, but it would be a mistake to conclude that the effects of fishing and pollution are less critical. To understand how marine communities and abiotic environment change, and the vulnerability of the marine environment, resources, human activities, and political decisions is a crucial issue, but it certainly requires the integration of natural and social–economic science research.

We seek works that provide a better understanding of the interactions among systems, pressures, and threats, and exploited communities, and how these changes affect socioeconomic activities, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. Theoretical, conceptual, modeling, experimental, and review studies are welcome. Examples include papers around the effective effect of climate change in marine species distribution or production, the vulnerability of marine habitats, management options for exploited marine communities under climate change, or topics that address the complex issues of food and income security, ecologically sustainable development of the fisheries sector among others, such as the role of climate change on socioeconomic systems. Papers can be reviews, syntheses, viewpoints, meta-analyses, and original research relevant to the environment, ecology, biology, fisheries, policy, human development, and/or economy anywhere on the globe.

Dr. Francisco Leitão
Dr. Catarina Vinagre
Dr. Juan Bueno Pardo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• climate change
• environmental variability
• marine coastal systems
• marine communities
• fishery resources
• species resilience
• impact of extreme climatic events
• socioeconomic effects