As climate change continues to warm the Earth and fish and other important resources move toward the Earth's poles, so are the world's wealthiest people, according to a new study from Rutgers University. The team that conducted the study claims that the shift in the behavior of migrating fish is a huge issue as it greatly affects those whose livelihoods depend on them.
"What we find is that natural resources like fish are being pushed around by climate change, and that changes who gets access to them," Malin Pinsky, who participated in the research, said in a press release.
Pinsky reports that the stronger and more conservation-oriented the natural resource management in a community, the more the community will value its natural resources whether they are increasing or decreasing. He says that if wealthier communities and countries are more likely to have strong resource management, then they are more likely to benefit, which creates inequality.
"Inclusive wealth," which refers to fish, plants and trees as well as human health and education, is moving out of the temperate zones and into the poles as the temperatures rise. The paper, which uses data that Pinsky gathered during his studies on fish migration in combination with a mathematical formula created by economist Eli Fenichel, evidences the unique relationship between natural resource movement and wealth.
"We tend to think of climate change as just a problem of physics and biology," Pinsky said. "But people react to climate change as well, and at the moment we don't have a good understanding for the impacts of human behavior on natural resources affected by climate change."
In the future, the team wishes to explore the more human side of the equation in order to further understand the relationship between climate change and wealth.
The findings were published in the Feb. 24 issue of Nature Climate Change.
