Historical Review of Research on Fisheries vs Climate Changes and Proposals for the Future in a Global Warming Context

This work has three main goals. The first is to present a broad historical review of the background of the international research activities dealing with fisheries and climate change, mainly in European waters. Marine environmental variability and climate changes are interconnected, being these, the main causes that determine the fluctuations in ecosystems and cyclically affect fisheries. We have recovered a selection of seminal international scientific publications from 1914-1995, which aroused great interest among the scientific community of that time, although most of these publications fall into oblivion in the 21st century. The second goal is to review the main intergovernmental impulses on climate and marine research from the 1980s to the present, detecting gaps and the lack of unanimity in some guidelines of international organizations. The third is to select proposals for the future, which include the need to promote an international retrospective on fisheries oceanography research, for at least the last hundred years. We also analyze decadal warming/cooling in the Canary Current Upwelling System (extending from NW Iberian Peninsula to Senegal), which may help understand the current rapid tropicalization of pelagic and benthic ecosystems in South European Atlantic seas.