Climate-driven ecosystem changes are increasingly affecting the world’s ocean ecosystems, necessitating urgent guidance on adaptation strategies to limit or prevent catastrophic impacts. The Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project (FishMIP) is a network and framework that provides standardised ensemble projections of the impacts of climate change and fisheries on ocean life and the benefits that it provides to people through fisheries. Since its official launch in 2013 as a small, self-organised project within the larger Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project, the FishMIP community has grown substantially and contributed to key international policy processes, such as the IPCC AR5 and AR6, and the IPBES Global Biodiversity Assessment. While not without challenges, particularly around comparing heterogeneous ecosystem models, integrating fisheries scenarios, and standardising regional-scale ecosystem models, FishMIP outputs are now being used across a variety of applications (e.g., climate change targets, fisheries management, marine conservation, Sustainable Development Goals). Over the next decade, FishMIP will focus on improving ecosystem model ensembles to provide more robust and policy-relevant projections for different regions of the world under multiple climate and societal change scenarios, and continue to be open to a broad spectrum of marine ecosystem models and modellers. FishMIP also intends to enhance leadership diversity and capacity-building to improve representation of early- and mid-career researchers from under-represented countries and ocean regions. As we look ahead, FishMIP aims to continue enhancing our understanding of how marine life and its contributions to people may change over the coming century at both global and regional scales.

The biological carbon pump is a key controller of how much carbon is stored within the global ocean. This pathway is influenced by food web interactions between zooplankton and their prey. In global biogeochemical models, Holling Type functional responses are frequently used to represent grazing interactions. How these responses are parameterised greatly influences biomass and subsequent carbon export estimates. The half-saturation constant, or k value, is central to the Holling functional response. Empirical studies show k can vary over three orders of magnitude, however, this variation is poorly represented in global models. This study derives zooplankton grazing dynamics from remote sensing products of phytoplankton biomass, resulting in global distribution maps of the grazing parameter k. The impact of these spatially varying k values on model skill and carbon export flux estimates is then considered. This study finds large spatial variation in k values across the global ocean, with distinct distributions for micro- and mesozooplankton. High half-saturation constants, which drive slower grazing, are generally associated with areas of high productivity. Grazing rate parameterisation is found to be critical in reproducing satellite-derived distributions of nanophytoplankton biomass, highlighting the importance of top-down drivers for this size class. Spatially varying grazing dynamics decrease mean total carbon export by >17% compared to globally homogeneous dynamics, with increases in faecal pellet export and decreases in export from algal aggregates. This study highlights the importance of grazing dynamics to both community structure and carbon export, with implications for modelling marine carbon sequestration under future climate scenarios.

Robust projections of future trends in global fish biomass, production and catches under different fishing scenarios are needed to inform fisheries policy in a changing climate. Trust in future projections, however, relies on establishing that the models used can accurately simulate past relationships between exploitation rates, catches and ecosystem states. Here we use fisheries catch and catch-only assessment models in combination with effort data to estimate regional fishing exploitation levels (defined as the fishing mortality relative to fishing mortality at maximum sustainable yield, F/FMSY). These estimates are given for large pelagic, forage and demersal fish types across all large marine ecosystems and the high seas between 1961 and 2004; and with a ‘ramp-up’ between 1841-1960. We find that global exploitation rates for both large pelagic and demersal fish are consistently higher than for forage fish and reached their peaks in the late 1980s. We use the exploitation rates to globally simulate historical fishing patterns in a mechanistic fish community model. We find a good match between model and reconstructed fisheries catch, both for total catch as well as catch distribution by functional type. Simulations show a clear deviation from an unfished model state, with a 25% reduction in fish biomass in large pelagic and demersal fish in shelf regions in the most recent years and a 50% increase in forage fish, primarily due to the release of predation pressure. These results can set a baseline from which the effect of climate change relative to fishing could be estimated.

There is an urgent need for models that can robustly detect past and project future ecosystem changes and risks to the services that they provide to people. The Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project (FishMIP) was established to develop model ensembles for projecting long-term impacts of climate change on fisheries and marine ecosystems while informing policy at spatio-temporal scales relevant to the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) framework. While contributing FishMIP models have improved over time, large uncertainties in projections remain, particularly in coastal and shelf seas where most of the world’s fisheries occur. Furthermore, previous FishMIP climate impact projections have mostly ignored fishing activity due to a lack of standardized historical and scenario-based human activity forcing and uneven capabilities to dynamically model fisheries across the FishMIP community. This, in addition to underrepresentation of coastal processes, has limited the ability to evaluate the FishMIP ensemble’s ability to adequately capture past states - a crucial step for building confidence in future projections. To address these issues, we have developed two parallel simulation experiments (FishMIP 2.0) on: 1) model evaluation and detection of past changes and 2) future scenarios and projections. Key advances include historical climate forcing, that captures oceanographic features not previously resolved, and standardized fishing forcing to systematically test fishing effects across models. FishMIP 2.0 is a key step towards a detection and attribution framework for marine ecosystem change at regional and global scales, and towards enhanced policy relevance through increased confidence in future ensemble projections.

Fish community biomass is generally thought to decline with increasing temperature due to higher metabolic losses resulting in less efficient energy transfer in warm-water food webs. However, whether these metabolic predictions explain observed macroecological patterns in fish community biomass is virtually unknown. Here we test these predictions by examining the variation in demersal fish biomass across 21 productive shelf regions using high-resolution monitoring data from the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific. We find that biomass per km2 varies 40-fold across regions and is highest in cold waters and areas with low fishing exploitation. We find no evidence that temperature change has impacted biomass within marine regions over time. Yet, the cross-regional patterns suggest that long-term impacts of warming will be negative on biomass. These results provide an empirical basis for predicting future changes in fish community biomass and its associated services for human wellbeing i.e., food provisioning, under global warming.

Although zooplankton play a substantial role in the biological carbon pump and serve as a crucial link between primary producers and higher trophic level consumers, the skillful representation of zooplankton is not often a focus of ocean biogeochemical models. Systematic evaluations of zooplankton in models could improve their representation, but so far, ocean biogeochemical skill assessment of Earth system model (ESM) ensembles have not included zooplankton. Here we use a recently developed global, observationally-based map of mesozooplankton biomass to assess the skill of mesozooplankton in six CMIP6 ESMs. We also employ a biome-based assessment of the ability of these models to reproduce the observed relationship between mesozooplankton biomass and surface chlorophyll. The combined analysis found that most models were able to reasonably simulate the large regional variations in mesozooplankton biomass at the global scale. Additionally, three of the ESMs simulated a mesozooplankton-chlorophyll relationship within the observational bounds, which we used as an emergent constraint on future mesozooplankton projections. We highlight where differences in model structure and parameters may give rise to varied mesozooplankton distributions under historic and future conditions, and the resultant wide ensemble spread in projected changes in mesozooplankton biomass. Despite differences, the strength of the mesozooplankton-chlorophyll relationships across all models was related to the projected changes in mesozooplankton biomass globally and in regional biomes. These results suggest that improved observations of mesozooplankton and their relationship to chlorophyll will better constrain projections of climate change impacts on these important animals.