Offshore wind (OSW) energy development and climate change jointly threaten the economic viability of commercial fisheries on the U.S. West Coast. Mitigating the impacts of these dual stressors will require (1) understanding how they will impact fisheries both individually and synergistically and (2) identifying, designing, and prioritizing strategies for mitigating the impacts of both stressors. The proposed research will predict how OSW development and climate change will impact West Coast fisheries and will identify strategies for mitigating these impacts on fishing communities. The work will be conducted in five stages. First, we will use literature review and data synthesis to identify the historical impacts of climate change on West Coast fisheries. This will serve as a foundation for framing future climate change impacts and strategies tailored to mitigating the magnitude of these impacts. Second, we will synthesize fisheries-dependent data from all three West Coast states to map the current distribution of fishing effort and its coincidence with current and proposed OSW lease areas. This will help to understand the contemporary impact of OSW development on West Coast fisheries and will provide a baseline to compare projected shifts in the distribution of fishing grounds under climate change. Third, we will use species distribution models that are published, under development, and generated as part of this research to project shifts in species distributions and fishing grounds under climate change. We will use these projections to estimate the impacts of climate change on West Coast fishing communities. Fourth, we will use these projections to examine shifts into and out of OSW lease areas. This will allow us to predict novel OSWfisheries
conflicts that are likely to emerge as a result of climate change. Finally, we will develop
a holistic typology of climate change impacts (e.g., more harmful algal blooms, more fisherieswildlife conflicts, more drought, new fisheries, etc.) and recommend mitigation strategies tailored to each of these impact archetypes. We will also provide guidance about how these strategies might be tactically implemented on the West Coast. One component of generating and vetting these strategies will be through regional focus groups composed of fishing industry members and representatives. Collectively, these projects will help BOEM to anticipate the joint impacts of OSW development and climate change on West Coast fisheries and to identify and prioritize tractable strategies for mitigating the impacts of these synergistic stressors.