Liz Bageant

Introduction: The impact of COVID-19 on small-scale fishing communities is of great concern given the importance of aquatic foods in trade, nutrition and livelihoods. Using a case study of Lake Victoria, augmented by published literature, we examine the socioeconomic dynamics and severity of COVID-19 impacts on Kenyan fishing communities.

Methods: A household level questionnaire was administered through phone interviews on a monthly basis from June 2020 to May 2021, including a focus group discussion in July 2021.

Results: We find that multifold fear of COVID-19 infection and control measures were present and varied across case rates and stringency of control measures. Fishers and traders reported being affected by disease control measures that limited market access and their ability to fish overnight. In spite of these worries, and contrary to what has been reported in the published literature regarding impacts observed in the early months of the pandemic, we see stable participation in fishing and fish trading over time despite the pandemic. Food insecurity was high before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, but did not substantially shift with the pandemic.

Conclusion: Our findings suggest that Kenyan fishing and fish trading households adopted diverse strategies to cope and balance generating income to provide for their families and staying safe. Our results underscore the need to understand ways in which acute pandemic impacts evolve over time given that effects are likely heterogeneous across small-scale fishing communities.

For decades, the lack of high-quality empirical economic research on the state of Africa's agriculture and rural economies has been an important factor impeding the formulation of evidence-based policy on the continent. The Structural Transformation of African Agriculture and Rural Spaces program aims to build a critical mass of early career African scholars and policy research through an emphasis on mentorship and professional development to help remedy that deficiency. This paper explains the motivations, origins, and outcomes to date of the program, and offers lessons learned for others wishing to create research capacity development opportunities for under-represented groups.

Small-scale fisheries underpin the aquatic food supply, and are facing acute challenges in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study aimed to examine how small-scale fishing households, including fishers and fish traders, are responding to COVID-19 and associated movement restrictions around Lake Victoria, Kenya. We conducted phone interviews with 88 households in three riparian communities around Lake Victoria to examine shifts in fish consumption, fishing activities, price changes, and coping strategies. We found that households are consuming less fish, perceiving high fish prices, and coping by more often selling than eating fish. Most fishers and traders reported spending less time fishing and trading, and concern about being infected with COVID-19 was high. Our findings suggest movement restrictions and COVID-19 concern, along with high lake levels in the region, may limit fishing activities and fish access. Controlling COVID-19 and supporting opportunities for fishers and traders to safely return to their livelihood activities will be paramount to the recovery of small-scale fishing communities today. Our findings can also support planning to mitigate the impacts of future crises on small-scale fishing communities.

Climate change will reshape ecological dynamics. Yet, how temperature increases alter the behavior and resource use of people reliant on natural resources remains underexplored. Consequent behavior shifts have the potential to mitigate or accelerate climate impacts on livelihoods and food security. Particularly within the small-scale inland fisheries that support approximately 10% of the global population, temperature changes likely affect both fish and fishers. To analyze how changing temperatures alter households' fishing behavior, we examined fishing effort and fish catch in a major inland fishery. We used longitudinal observational data from households in Cambodia, which has the highest per-capita consumption of inland fish in the world. Higher temperatures caused households to reduce their participation in fishing but had limited net effects on fish catch. Incorporating human behavioral responses to changing environmental conditions will be fundamental to determining how climate change affects rural livelihoods, food production, and food access.

Freshwater social-ecological systems are shaped by site-specific characteristics, environmental change and annual fluctuations, and the actions of resource users and managers. Our primary aim is to analyze the relative effects of these multifacted forces on fishery productivity and biodiversity using the case of community-managed protected areas within Cambodia's rice field fisheries, known as community fish refuges. Our secondary aim is to take advantage of fixed-effects regression models, a rigorous approach that is common in other disciplines, yet novel to analysis of social-ecological system productivity, and allows comparison of each site to itself across time using observational data. We analyze the relative associations of site characteristics, annual fluctuations, biophysical modifications (e.g., deepening, creation of inlet/outlets, etc.), and governance capacity (i.e., community committee meeting intensity, fundraising to support illegal fishing patrols, etc.) with fish biomass and biodiversity within 40 refuges over three years. We find that seasonal and site-specific effects within this system relate strongly to biomass and species richness patterns. We also find an association between biomass and biodiversity and some elements of governance capacity building. Our findings suggest that in this setting solutions tailored and responsive to the local context may be most appropriate given the strong interannual and site-specific drivers. Methodologically, the dynamism and site specificity of such systems befits within-site comparisons over long time horizons to appreciate the factors that drive biomass and biodiversity.

Projections suggest that by 2050, climate change will reduce global fish catch by 3–13%, with fish catch falling by as much as 30% in some tropical marine systems. Freshwater fisheries are particularly susceptible to the warming effects of climate change because shallower, hydrologically distinct water bodies are easily affected by atmospheric temperatures and less easily accommodate fish migrations. Damage to freshwater fisheries is a problem particularly for poor and undernourished human populations, which are especially dependent on them. Despite the severity of projected climate change effects on fish catch and the risk to human health, few empirical studies have examined how fish catch is already responding to climate variability, the ways fishers are adapting to these changes, and how it affects people's consumption of fish, which are rich in micronutrients and fatty acids. We aim here to account for behavioural responses among fishers to identify the ecological effect of flood and weather on fish catch in Cambodian rice field fisheries, and patterns of fish consumption and nutrition in the local communities. In this longitudinal cohort study, we use a panel dataset collected by WorldFish of 400 households dependent on rice field fisheries over 3 years (19 distinct timepoints) to examine how changing flood patterns and temperature alter households' fish catch and whether fishing families respond by either adapting the effort put into fishing (ie, hours, time of day, or number of family members involved) or fish consumption. We analyse the net effect of biophysical changes on household fish catch, the effect of biophysical changes (flood, temperature, and rainfall) on household fish catch and fish consumption with the addition of controls for fishing effort, a key way that fishers might adapt to ecological changes, and the direct effect of biophysical changes on fishing effort and fish consumption. Preliminary results suggest that from November, 2012, to November, 2015, fishing families changed their fishing effort and practices to adapt to the effects of flood and temperature changes on fish catch. Updated data and analyses will allow us to disentangle these effects by using an identification strategy to separate the ecological effects of flood and temperature changes on fish catch from the ways households respond to changes in fish availability. Our results have broad implications for understanding the ways that climate change might affect the 10% of the global population that rely on small-scale fisheries in low-income countries. Analyses of fish catch will show the effects of flood and temperature changes on fish catch and how households respond to these changes. Further, analyses of the effects on consumption of fish will show how temperature potentially alters access to micronutrient-rich food. Our findings suggest the ways that the changing global climate might affect the health and wellbeing of natural resource-dependent communities. Financial support for this project was provided by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Rice Field Fisheries Enhancement project and Cornell University's David R Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future Postdoctoral Fellows Program. The contents and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the US Government.