Understanding tipping point dynamics in harvested ecosystems is of crucial importance for sustainable resource management because ignoring their existence imperils social-ecological systems that depend on them. Fisheries collapses provide the best known examples for realizing tipping points with catastrophic ecological, economic and social consequences. However, present-day fisheries management systems still largely ignore the potential of their resources to exhibit such abrupt changes towards irreversible low productive states. Using a combination of statistical changepoint analysis and stochastic cusp modelling, here we show that Western Baltic cod is beyond such a tipping point caused by unsustainable exploitation levels that failed to account for changing environmental conditions. Furthermore, climate change stabilizes a novel and likely irreversible low productivity state of this fish stock that is not adapted to a fast warming environment. We hence argue that ignorance of non-linear resource dynamics has caused the demise of an economically and culturally important social-ecological system which calls for better adaptation of fisheries systems to climate change.
© 2021. The Author(s).