Transformation in times of climate change: what makes a fisher diversify livelihoods?

Abstract

Despite the importance of livelihood diversification as a transformation strategy in small-scale fisheries facing climate change, empirical evidence on this complex phenomenon is scarce. This work aims to shed light on factors that help to explain the transformative behavior of small-scale fishers when faced with climate change impacts. Using primary survey data from 404 small-scale fishers across 9 communities in Galicia, NW Spain, we examined how different aspects of fishers’ adaptive capacities relate to their stated decisions to engage in livelihood diversification when faced with hypothetical climate change scenarios. The results of our multinomial multilevel mixed-effect logit model show that flexibility (current income diversification level and diversity of target fishery resources) has a strong, positive relationship with livelihood diversification responses. In contrast, learning, social organization, and competing concerns played a complex role. Specifically, we found that social-ecological system knowledge, communication with different fishing groups (bridging communication), trust in institutional actors, and gender (female) were positively related to livelihood diversification when faced with climate impacts. Fishing experience, communication within fishing groups (bonding communication), and trust in other fishing groups (bridging trust) were negatively related to diversification. Our results provide new empirical evidence on the factors associated with fisher’s decisions to engage in livelihood diversification when faced with climate impacts on fishery resources, lending critical insight for climate adaptation programs and policies.

Proposed Solutions to the Problems of the Lake Chad Fisheries: Resilience Lessons for Africa?

“…Of the three resilience strategies, adaptive resilience strategies are most likely to succeed because, unlike passive resilience strategies, they entail positive action by fishers to address the problems facing them, and unlike transformative resilience strategies, they are realistic in scale and largely within the fishers' own hands to implement [14,25]. The diversifying of livelihoods is increasingly becoming a response to alleviate the impact of climate change on fisheries [45][46][47][48] and this could provide a foundation for developing climate-smart fisheries policies for Lake Chad.…”

The future of gender research in small‐scale fisheries: Priorities and pathways for advancing gender equity

“…Livelihood diversification is relevant for all genders engaged in SSF, amplified by climate change and overfishing. While women's livelihoods are often most vulnerable (Appiah et al., 2021), women have been found to be most likely to diversify their livelihood activities (Freeman & Svels, 2022; Salgueiro‐Otero et al., 2022).…”

Linking smallholders’ livelihood resilience with their adaptation strategies to climate impacts: insights from the Tibetan Plateau

“…Because the dependent variables in this paper are discrete and multiple choice variables (i.e., 1,2,3,4) that are mutually exclusive, a multinomial logit model (mlogit model) was used to explore which components of livelihood resilience influence smallholders to adopt different adaptation strategies. The mlogit model has been widely used in studies of smallholder livelihoods in different sectors (Hua et al 2017, Mohammed et al 2021, Salgueiro-Otero et al 2022.…”

“…(2) the relationship between climate change adaptation and smallholder livelihood resilience can be extended to other sectors affected by climate change, such as fisheries (smallholder fishers also face the option of maintaining, diversifying, or abandoning small-scale fisheries [Salgueiro-Otero et al 2022]) or agroforestry . Therefore, more efforts are needed to better link smallholders' adaptation with their livelihood resilience.…”