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.

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.