Salmon catches in trouble: Climate change hurting Japan’s fishing industry

Climate change is becoming a bigger global problem each day. This largely anthropogenic crisis is increasing temperatures in different countries and triggering natural disasters such as storms and floods of much higher frequencies.

There is trouble on the horizon in Hokkaido as poor fishing conditions triggered by global heating are endangering Japan’s prized salmon. The prolonged decline in salmon numbers has forced seafood retailers to hike the price.

Masahide Kaeriyama, a salmon ecology expert and professor emeritus at Hokkaido Uni, has sounded the alarm, stressing that if the trend continues, Japan is not going to have any salmon in the next century. This is definitely concerning.

Japan’s salmon fishing industry, a major part of the country’s food culture, peaked in the 1990s and 2000s as artificial hatching and release programs expanded. But as less number of salmon return to Japan each year, securing eggs for artificial hatching has become difficult.