Andrew Rosenberg has always felt most at home near the sea.

“I grew up on the ocean,” he says. “I’ve been sailing since I was two years old…. I knew whatever I was going to do, I was going to work on the ocean.”

He made good on that promise. He earned degrees in fisheries science, oceanography, and biology, and has studied and promoted ocean health for more than 40 years.

In the ’90s, Rosenberg worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service. There, he helped develop regulations to address overfishing in New England and the Mid-Atlantic.

He says fish populations have slowly started to recover. But now, climate change threatens to undo that progress.

“I spent a lot of my career and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on trying to end problems of overfishing,” Rosenberg says. “And now we have another major human-impacts problem that might wipe out those accomplishments.”

The Gulf of Maine, where Rosenberg lives, is warming faster than almost any other spot in the world’s oceans. Species such as lobsters and clams are already moving north or to deeper, colder waters.

So Rosenberg says preventing overfishing is no longer enough. To protect ocean ecosystems, the world must limit global warming.

Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy/ChavoBart Digital Media.