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The effects of climate change on fisheries are already apparent, impacting the livelihoods, wellbeing, and food security of communities dependent on marine ecosystems. The resulting vulnerability is distributed unequally among those communities and is a function of the exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to the impacts of climate change. Vulnerability assessments, an increasingly important approach for understanding variability in susceptibility to climate change, often fail to include or recognize the perceptions of individuals in the focal system. Perceptions of vulnerability may differ from vulnerability measured by subject experts, and failure to acknowledge perceptions as well as the value in local knowledge systems can lead to ineffective climate adaptation plans and lack of support for climate policies. In this dissertation I explore several concepts related to perceptions of climate change vulnerability in …