Climate change vulnerability and perceived impacts on small-scale fisheries in eastern Mindanao

Perceived Vulnerability and Climate Change Impacts on Small-Scale Fisheries in Davao Gulf, Philippines

“…The thirty respondents per fishing village, although a limited number, was sufficient to represent the subject population in the area (Mason, 2010;Dworkin, 2012). We have conducted similar studies with fishers in the past taking this minimum number of 30 respondents per barangay and using it for quantitative analyses in our previous studies (Macusi et al, 2015a(Macusi et al, ,b, 2019(Macusi et al, , 2020. With this number, we found that the data can already reach saturation and redundancy of responses during the interviews.…”

“…Because of this, there is an urgent need to locally assess the vulnerability of the fisheries to climate change impacts. This was no less than recommended in the case of the Philippine fisheries in recent publications discussing climate change impacts in the Philippines (Sales, 2009;Mamauag et al, 2013;Jacinto et al, 2015;Macusi et al, 2020) and economic modeling on impacts of climate change on marine capture fisheries (Suh and Pomeroy, 2020). The municipal fisheries of the Philippines mainly consist of small fishing boats that weigh less than three gross tons, manned by individual fishers or has a crew of two or three fishers.…”

“…In 2018, the fishing industry contributed more than 16% (Php 122 billion; U$2.32 billion) to the agricultural sector and 1.3% to the GDP generating over Php 265 billion (U$5.03 billion) to the country's economy with its 4.35 million metric tons of production (BFAR, 2019). However, this economic contribution is now threatened by climate change impacts, marine pollution, overexploitation and declining fish catches as a result of negligence on fisheries management and human impacts to the environment (Nañola et al, 2011;Macusi et al, 2020;Onda et al, 2020;Suh and Pomeroy, 2020). Assessing the vulnerability of small-scale fisheries to climate change impacts will therefore provide an evidence-based policy decision making that can be formulated by members of the local, regional and national government.…”

“…Given that the smallscale fisheries provide food and livelihood to fishers that are dependent on natural marine resources, they can be vulnerable to climatic variabilities. Previous studies have already demonstrated and analyzed the vulnerability of small-scale fisheries to climate change in developing countries and focused their assessment on fishing communities (Daw et al, 2009;Sales, 2009;Mamauag et al, 2013;Blair and Momtaz, 2018;Macusi et al, 2020). Some have provided insights on the vulnerability of the fisheries at a global scale (Allison et al, 2009), including making projections of catch redistribution under various climate change scenarios (Cheung et al, 2010), focused on environmental hazards namely flooding, rainfall and volcanism (Pati and Cruz, 2017;Cabrera and Lee, 2020;Yumul et al, 2011).…”

“…Hence, by conducting vulnerability assessments in the different fisheries sectors, this can provide solutions in minimizing the impacts of climate change to ecosystem services provided by the marine ecosystem. Also, by identifying the linkages and evaluating the drivers of social and ecological vulnerability to climate change this could reduce climate change impacts on the fisheries sector (Kittinger et al, 2015;McClanahan et al, 2015;Macusi et al, 2020). Our study will first describe the current status of the fisheries, followed by perceptions of small-scale fishers in the Davao Gulf on the different sources of vulnerability and perceived fisheries impacts of climate change.…”