Ocean Warming: A Livelihood Threat to Ghana’s Coastal Fishers

Commentary by Emmanuel Akyeampong, John M. Kusimi, andRobert Paarlberg

Published October 8, 2024

A decades-long decline in stocks of small, sardine-like pelagic fish is threatening the livelihoods of more than 100,000 fishers along Ghana's coast, plus nearly 2 million more people who earn their income from processing, transporting, and marketing this traditional fish catch. Shrinking fish stocks also imperil the Ghana's food security. Fish and seafood supply some 60 percent of the animal protein in Ghanaians' diet. Overfishing is usually the most obvious explanation for a decline in fish stocks, but in this case, it is only part of the story. Even if this fishery were better managed, the local stocks would not be able to recover, due to the warming of offshore ocean waters driven by climate change. Communities that now depend on fishing will soon need help transitioning to alternative livelihoods.

Ghanaian authorities are fully aware of this crisis. In a 2023 public speech, Ghana's minister of fisheries and aquaculture development, Mavis Hawa Koomson, acknowledged that annual landings of some small pelagic fish had fallen to less than 10 percent of their 1992 level. She correctly attributed this crisis to a trio of causes: "climate change, Illegal, Unregulated, and Unreported (IUU) fishing, [and] excessive fishing capacity." Then she laid out a list of official policy responses to help fishers, including continuing premix fuel subsidies for their motorized canoes and providing them with outboard motors and fish storage freezers. Such measures may support fishing communities in the short run, but they will only encourage more fishing, hastening the collapse of fish stocks. Ocean warming has made this collapse virtually impossible to avoid.

Ocean Warming and the Fishery Decline

Heat-trapping greenhouse gasses (GHGs) warm the Earth's oceans as well as its atmosphere. In fact, roughly 90 percent of today's extra trapped heat ends up in the ocean. This moderates warming on land in the short run, but it brings serious harm in the long run. Ocean warming has recently been accelerating. As seen in the chart below, what had only been a slow rise in average water temperatures accelerated in 2023, bringing an alarming jump. Similarly, as humanity's GHG emissions have soared, the ocean has absorbed increasing amounts of carbon dioxide (CO₂). CO₂ renders ocean water more acidic. Studies by fisheries scientists at the University of Ghana have found that ocean acidification is contributing to diminished fishery abundance and diversity in Ghanaian waters.

A warming ocean holds less oxygen, harming all marine life. Warming also alters the thermal structure of the ocean. Stratification of the sea in different temperature layers impedes the circulation of oxygen and vital nutrients between the surface waters and the deeper ocean. Yet for traditional coastal fishing communities, the top threat from ocean warming is fish stock migration. Fish are cold-blooded, so when the water becomes too warm, their only means to regulate body temperature is to go deep or swim away, out of reach of traditional fishers.

In West Africa, as sea surface temperatures have increased, significant geographic shifts in the range of small pelagic fish (fish living in the open ocean) populations have already taken place. Along the Atlantic coast of West Africa, the range of the species Sardinella aurita, a favorite target population for artisanal fishers, has been moving since 1995 at an average rate of 181 kilometers (km) per decade. Rates of migration closer to 200 km per decade have been observed for three other small pelagic species. Sea water temperatures along the Ghanaian coast have been increasing at an average rate of 0.011 degrees Celsius every year since the 1960s, and under the most severe GHG concentration pathway (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5), the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that these sea surface temperatures could increase another 3 degrees Celsius by 2099.

Dynamic bioclimatic envelope models are used to estimate the declines in maximum fish catch potential that will result from such future ocean warming scenarios. One 2012 modeling study of 14 West African countries conducted at the University of British Columbia projected potential changes in maximum catch potential of 50 percent or more from the 2000s to the 2050s under a high-range greenhouse gas emissions scenario, compared to a zero warming alternative. In 2018 the FAO published a similar study projecting that climate change alone-even with well-managed fisheries-could reduce the maximum catch potential of the Guinea Current System by 30 percent or more by 2050. The ocean warming trend cannot be reversed in the decades just ahead since greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will remain high, so even if overfishing is contained, these declines in maximum catch potential will prevent Ghana's offshore fishery from recovering to its earlier level of productivity.

Current Sources of Overfishing

Ghana's small pelagic fish stocks are most visibly overfished today by foreign industrial trawlers-mostly Chinese-that have been allowed to operate within that nation's exclusive economic zone through joint venture arrangements with Ghanaian partners. These large vessels engage in multiple illegal practices, such as using small mesh nets to take undersized juvenile fish that haven't had a chance to reproduce and fishing within Inshore Exclusion Zones supposedly reserved for artisanal canoes. Civil society watchdog organizations have publicly documented these violations of Ghana's own fishing laws, along with the bribes paid to local port authorities and police.

Yet Ghana's artisanal canoe fleet also contributes to the problem. These traditional fishers, who operate in large numbers, also break the rules on net mesh size, while engaging in other illegal practices such as luring fish to the surface with submerged lights or killing them with dynamite or chemicals. Policing such practices is a logistical challenge given the large numbers of canoes (12,000) and the many separate landing beaches (more than 250) scattered along Ghana's 500 km coastline.

To contain overfishing, the government of Ghana began imposing "closed seasons" in 2016 to prevent fish from being taken during peak spawning periods. This well-intended policy has so far proven insufficient. Ghana's Fisheries Commission gauged the results of the policy after both the 2022 closed season and the 2023 closed season, by measuring changes in average canoe catch rates and average fish size for round sardinella, flat sardinella, and anchovy. For round sardinella, the average catch size in 2023 was 16.5 cm, slightly larger than the 16.1 cm average size in 2022. This may seem like progress, but the minimum legal landing size for this species is 18 cm, so most of the catch was still technically illegal, and following the closed season in 2023, average catch rates per canoe trip for this species actually declined.

To be effective in rebuilding fish stocks, a closed-season policy should have been embraced long before 2016, before the spawning stock had undergone such an extreme reduction in total biomass. A 2021 report from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)'s Ghana Fisheries Recovery Activity (GFRA) offered an assessment of stocks for four small pelagic fish species (round sardinella, flat sardinella, anchovy, and mackerel) and concluded that the biomass of the spawning stock for these species was "so reduced that it is unable to replenish itself."

Vocational Training Can Help Communities Adapt

Improved fishing policies may be able to slow the catch decline, but ocean warming will eventually require large shifts of labor away from coastal fishing. This change in livelihoods is certain to be painful and disruptive without wise policy support, but if training in alternative vocations is provided, the welfare of today's fishers-and their children-could actually be improved.

This vocational training approach has been endorsed by the dean of Ghana's School of Research and Graduate Studies at its Institute of Management and Public Administration, Professor Wisdom Akpalu. Akpalu observes that the public funds now spent on fuel subsidies for fishers (equal to roughly $40 million in 2023) could be better spent on livelihood supports, to help fishers and their children learn "employable skills" other than fishing: "[I]f you withdraw the subsidy, there is so much you can do with that money. One thing you can do with that subsidy is use it to train the youth - engage them in all kinds of economic activities. You can use it to help them acquire skills and become tilers, masons, dressmakers among others; and use some to even improve the education they receive in the communities."

One important effort to do this is a $17.8 million "alternative livelihood training support" program, launched in 2021 as part of the GFRA, a partnership between Ghana's Ministry for Fisheries and Aquaculture and USAID's Feed the Future program.

GFRA's goal is to train 8000 fishing community members-men and women 15-35 years of age-in alternative livelihood options through 3-12 month apprenticeships for skills training, leading to competence-based certification under Ghana's official Technical and Vocation Educational Training program. This will prepare them to work in trades such as plumbing, garment making, cosmetology, floor and wall tiling, baking and cookery, auto mechanics, carpentry, and masonry. As of September 2023, a total of 682 individuals had already graduated from these programs. GFRA conducts the training with "master crafts persons" hired by Ghana's Opportunities Industrialization Centers. Trainees receive the basic tools (utensils, sewing machines, pliers, cutters, cables) plus the consumables they will need to learn their craft. The budget cost of this program is currently estimated at $400 per trainee, a substantial investment, but the added income per trainee can exceed this initial investment in just a few months.

Will International Partners Support Training Fishers for Alternative Vocations?

Since the training in this case can be framed as an adaptation to climate change, substantial funding from international partners might be available. The proliferating climate finance architecture in Africa includes public funding from regional multilateral development banks, a G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group, a Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action, and also a UN Green Climate Fund (GCF). This fund is country-driven (national governments must apply), but it is mandated to allocate half of its resources to climate adaptation investments, and half of those resources must be invested in the most climate-vulnerable countries, especially African states. In July 2022, the GCF approved a $25 million project in Gambia, building resilience to climate change in both freshwater and marine fisheries, explicitly including efforts to "diversify livelihoods." The GCF's demonstrated receptivity to livelihood diversification for fishers should encourage Ghana to submit an application of its own, to sustain and scale up the GFRA program already underway.

Will Fishing Communities Be Willing to Seek Alternative Livelihoods?

This important question was addressed through an in-person survey administered in Ghana in May 2024, as part of a Salata Institute research project through Harvard University. Ghanaian university researchers conducted face-to-face interviews with 101 fishing household members in Anyamam (68 km east of Accra). All of those interviewed, men and women, were adults who "engaged directly in catching, processing, or marketing fish from the ocean." Most (98 percent) said more than half of their household income depended on fishing-related activities, and 74 percent said "nearly all" of their household income came from such activities.

Among those interviewed, almost none (only two) said their local fish catch was roughly the same as in the past, while all the others said it was "decreasing" compared to the past. Most were realistic about the bleak prospects their children would eventually face if they tried to make a living fishing. When asked if their children would be able to depend on fishing in the future, or on the processing and marketing of fish, 90 percent said "no."

As one healthy response to these realities, a shift of fishing labor into the non-fishing economy is already happening. Ghana's Fisheries Commission reported 2022 that total numbers of fishers had actually peaked a decade earlier in 2013, and had fallen since then from 140,000 to about 110,000. A USAID study from the same year found that 19 percent of coastal Ghana fisherfolk already had a supplemental non-fishing income source, and Ghana's official 2022 survey of fishing communities went further, reporting that 43 percent of fishermen were engaged in some activity other than fishing, including farming, masonry, carpentry, and basket weaving. The Fisheries Commission said young fishers in particular have been "pursuing education and leaving the traditional vocation of fishing." Ghanaian scholars conclude that this labor exit "is primarily due to the decline in fish capture and low income rewards" from artisanal fishing. Young fishers are seeing this in their own lives, so the demand for vocational training has been high. GFRA's alternative livelihood training program had twice as many applicants as its limited budget was able to accommodate.

The authors' own research project in Ghana concluded that alternative livelihood training programs for younger fishers will be welcomed so long as they are voluntary rather than mandatory, flexible regarding the type and duration of training offered, and free from burdensome fees for the purchase of training materials. A government effort to find more international funding to support this livelihood strategy would be a worthy adaptation move in the face of growing climate threats.

Emmanuel Akyeampong is Ellen Gurney professor of History and professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. John M. Kusimi is senior lecturer in the Department of Geography and Resource Development at the University of Ghana. Robert Paarlberg is senior associate (non-resident) of the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

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