Assessing the Vulnerability of Marine Fisheries in China: Towards an Inter-Provincial Perspective

Abstract

China’s marine fisheries are undergoing large-scale environmental changes associated with climate change, marine pollution, and overfishing. The assessment of marine fisheries vulnerability has become extremely necessary for fisheries management and sustainable development. However, studies on China’s marine fisheries vulnerability remains sparse. This study aimed to provide an analysis of the inter-provincial level vulnerability of China’s marine fisheries under multiple disturbances. The vulnerability measure was composed of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity indicators specific to marine fisheries based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) definitions. Results showed that Liaoning, Hebei, Fujian, and Hainan provinces appeared to be the most vulnerable; Shanghai appeared to be less vulnerable among China’s 11 coastal provinces; and the key sources of vulnerability differed considerably among coastal regions. The high vulnerability regions could be divided into two different patterns according to the combination of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, but they all had one thing in common: relatively low adaptive capacity. While some existing coercive measures to reduce dependence on fisheries were found to be helpful in China, the reality showed that appropriate adaptation measures such as improving fishermen’s education level and increasing vocational training may be helpful in enhancing the existing policy effectiveness.

Assessing poverty and livelihood vulnerability of the fishing communities in the context of pollution of the Churni River, India

“…The entropy weight method is popularly used in the multicriteria decision-making process (Chen et al 2018). For the present study, the weights are assigned separately to each variable of vulnerability function where the sum of weights for each function becomes 1.…”

Monitoring the Health of Coastal Environments in the Pacific Region—A Review

“…The Asia-Pacific coastal regions face a range of anthropogenic threats, especially around heavily populated areas such coastal China [ 15 ]. It is well-recognized that healthy oceans and thriving coastal and freshwater ecosystems are essential for economic growth and food production [ 84 ].…”

“…Potential changes in marine resource distribution and abundance are significant in these densely populated tropical regions of high biodiversity, where small-scale fishing operations constitute more than 90% of the world’s fish traders. For example, the expanding Chinese marine fisheries are now suffering from the depletion of resources due to multiple anthropogenic threats, including overfishing, pollution and land reclamation [ 15 ].…”

Vulnerability Assessment and Spatio-Temporal Difference Analysis of Inland Fisheries Flood Disaster in China

“…Based on the perspective of food security, Ding et al (2017) analyzed the impact of climate change on the vulnerability of marine fisheries in 109 countries from three aspects: national exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. Qi et al (2018) used a vulnerability model to assess the vulnerability of marine fisheries in 11 coastal provinces in China from three aspects: exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. Kim et al (2018) compared the climatic vulnerability of coastal and inshore fisheries and found that the climatic vulnerability of coastal fisheries was higher than that of inshore fisheries.…”