Impacts of Shifts in Commercial Fishing Techniques on Coastal Zones and
Climate Change
Abstract
Worldwide, the fisheries sector is growing with improved technologies to
meet the ever-growing demand for seafood. However, with climate change
and increasing marine pollution, there are also significant concerns
about declining biodiversity and its impact on income and livelihoods
for small-scale fishers. There is a significant shift from traditional
fishing methods to mechanization and aquaculture in India. However, the
new alternatives have come with many downsides which often go unnoticed.
Mechanized fishing contributes to GHGs emissions, destruction of the
seabed, overexploitation, and disrupting the ocean food chain. Likewise,
coastal aquaculture emits GHGs during feed production, discharges
organic and inorganic wastes, involves LULC changes and destroys
ecologically sensitive areas (ESAs), leading to loss of various
ecosystem services that increase environmental vulnerability and leads
to higher ecological footprint. The impacts of climate change on the
fishing sector and coastal areas are well established. However, there is
a need to understand the impact of changes in fishing techniques on
coastal zones and climate change. In this paper, the changes in the
fishing sector are evaluated, followed by the development of a framework
to assess the impacts of those changes on coastal zones and climate
change. The changes in commercial fishing techniques are assessed by
determining the dominant fishing techniques prevailing across India,
along with reasons for a shift from traditional methods. A Life-Cycle
Cost Assessment (LCCA) of the dominant techniques, aquaculture and
mechanized fishing, helped to verify the need for such a shift. Two case
study areas are selected for sample data collection for computing LCCA
of aquaculture and mechanized fishing - Worli in Mumbai and Bhimavaram
in Andhra Pradesh for studying mechanized fishing and aquaculture
respectively. LCCA of the dominant techniques against traditional
techniques showed that economic viability is one of the major reasons
for the shift, which was later confirmed during the interviews with
fishermen. These methods though profitable have various impacts on
coastal ecosystems and emit GHGs making them unsustainable. The paper
develops a framework to categorize the impacts of these changes on
coastal zones and climate change and suggests appropriate methods to
compute those impacts.