The impact of environmental change on small-scale fishing communities: moving beyond adaptive capacity to community response

Abstract Small-scale fishing (SSF) communities face numerous current and future climate-related stressors. While many studies address the perceived resilience or latent adaptive capacity of these communities to such stressors, little existing work analyzes the observable responses of coastal communities to documented or ongoing climate-related stressors. Here we provide an analytical framework for exploring community responses to distinct stressors, as well as the attributes of communities that mediate different response types. We provide an example application of this framework to display the utility of this approach in categorizing observed community responses documented in existing literature. Application of this framework to the broader and growing body of literature describing responses of SSF communities to environmental perturbations will allow for greater insight into the characteristics of both communities and stressors that drive adaptive, reactive, or coping responses.