An extensive scholarship on water commons explores the provision, use, and sustainability of freshwater. However, freshwater commons (rivers, lakes, floodplains, among others) are also sites of critically important food systems – fisheries and aquaculture – which are increasingly affected by climate change. To understand climate change experiences in these freshwater food commons, we conducted 32 semi-structured interviews with key informants who have expertise in diverse freshwater food systems in 20 different countries. The interviews explored climate change hazards, impacts, and adaptations, as well as the social, economic, and environmental contexts in which they play out. The results demonstrate that, while there are some similarities with climate change experiences in marine and coastal fisheries and aquaculture, the ways in which climate change affects freshwater food commons is uniquely shaped by the historical and current governance of freshwater proper, to which commons scholarship has traditionally attended. For example, in many cases, climate change impacts on the food security and livelihoods of actors in freshwater fisheries and aquaculture cannot be understood separately from the histories of exclusion, marginalization, and environmental degradation associated with the development of dams for hydropower or irrigation. Efforts to disentangle the additive, multiplicative, and even moderating effects of climate change vis-à-vis other drivers are not only analytically fraught but also politically charged. Adding to the complexity, freshwater food systems are intricately linked with terrestrial systems, including through many mixed fishing-agricultural livelihoods. In this context, our paper details how actors adapt to multifaceted changes by utilizing a bricolage of heterogeneous institutional, material, and ideological elements to attempt to maintain their food security and livelihoods. The results point to the importance of attending to multiple, overlapping terrestrial and aquatic commons when analyzing climate change impacts in freshwater commons
