Climate-smart fisheries: CO2 emissions reduction and food security are complementary

In the global north, climate-smart fisheries (CSF) policies prioritise steps to combat CO2 emissions from SSF, in a response to the fact that globally, CO2 emissions from small-scale fisheries (SSFs) increased by over 5.8 times between 1950 and 2016. However, in the global south, CSF policies on SSF prioritise food and income security over CO2 emission reduction. In this paper, we examine this apparently contrasting interpretation of CSF as a conceptual framework to interpret the case study of Sierra Leone, one of Africa's poorest countries where we found that small-scale coastal fishers are preoccupied with mitigating the impact of climate change on their food and income security rather than with lowering their CO2 emissions. The self-image of SSF in Sierra Leone is that of being victims of climate change rather than perpetrators of it, and they justify this stance by claiming their livelihoods are being threatened by climate change. However, it could be argued that the best way to keep Sierra Leonean SSF CO2 emissions low is to prioritise their food and income security: in other words, that food security and CO2 reductions are complementary not contradictory. This, at any rate, is the argument of the current paper. The fieldwork for this study entailed co-created research in Sierra Leone and it involved 103 stakeholders who met face-to-face and online between January and March 2022 and through village meetings. The results of this fieldwork showed that food and income security and not CO2 emissions are the priorities in the stakeholders’ interpretation of CSF. However, if food and income security are not prioritised, communities are likely to adopt maladaptive strategies which undermine marine protected areas (MPAs) and exacerbate overfishing, thereby increasing CO2 emissions. Moreover, investment in aquaculture as a supplementary or alternative livelihood can directly increase food security and incomes and at the same time indirectly serve as a CO2 mitigation measure. In addition, weather information communication is an important CSF measure which both protects fishers from the impact of climate change and reduces their CO2 emissions. Accordingly, we argue that the contrast between reducing CO2 emissions and protecting food security from climate change may be more apparent than real in Sierra Leone coastal fisheries, since both policies may work in tandem together. This study therefore contributes a new interpretation of CSF in the global south: instead of seeing it as posing a conflict between CO2 emissions reductions and food security, we have shown the two objectives can be complementary. The wider implication of this paper is that CSF strategies for SSFs do not have to be polarised between the global north's focus on the reduction of CO2 emissions from fishing vessels and the global south's focus on the mitigation of the impact of global warming on SSFs. There are circumstances when the two objectives may be in harmony.