633 zy -I; >=*% ! i) zyx e z Reprinted from zyxw Naga, The ICLARM Q. 15(4):26-30. z The Climate and Eastern Ocean Systems Project A. BAKUN, V. CHRISTENSEN, C. CURTIS M.H. DURAND, D. HUSBY, R. MENDELSSOHN, J. MENDO, R. PARRISH, D. PAULY and C. ROY Abstract A brief description of the NMFS/ORSTOM/ICLARM Climate and Eastern Ocean Systems (CEOS) project is given. CEOS will study the four major eastern boundary current regions (Peru/Chile, California, Northwest and Southwest Africa) and attempt to separatelocal short- term changes of their resources and/or dynamics from long-term, climatic global changes. Expected products range from a large, widely accessible zyxwvutsrq oceanographic/atmospheric database to various documents that will present key results as well as improved contacts and stronger analytical capabilities in cooperating national institutions. Introduction The injection of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gasesinto the earth's atmosphere may be viewed as a giganticexperiment aimed at exploring the earth's reaction to such challenge. Unfortunately, this experiment is run withoutproper "controls", and hence the heated debates about the actual impact of those gases may last too long, beyond the time where the "experiment" should be called off. The international scientific community is forced, however, to address this problem in spite of the lack of scientificcontrols. One way to address this is throughthe comparative method, a major tool in those disciplines in which experiments are hard to perform, e.g., evolutionary biology (Mayr 19821, and fisheries science(Parrishet al. 1983;Bakun 1985). off Peru/Chile, California, Nor Africa (Fig. 1) bothas sourcesof fi scientistsfrom the PacificFisheri (PFEG), the National Marine Fisheries Institut Français de Recherche Scientifique pour le Développement en Coopération (ORSTOM), and the International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management(ICLARM),and partnersfromother institutions have teamed up to investigate these systems in the context of global changes, through a project called CEOS (Climate and Eastern Ocean Systems) funded by the NationalOceanicand AtmosphericAdministration(NOAA) and ORSTOM. Given the importance of the Fig. 1. zyxwvu Location of the four major upwelling systems to be investigated by CEOS, zyx with photos four major upwelling systems of some of the major sources of information on these systems. * uns;suivLvL. tijilQS MdLu!1le11Ld1'G