Abstract

Artisanal fisheries contribute to sustainable livelihoods of people in several ways accounting for more than 80% of total fish production in Nigeria. Climate change arising from global warming, increasing temperature, stratification and changes in ecosystem processes brings flooding, precipitation, evaporation, run-off and flow with potential serious negative impacts on fish assemblages and productions, fishing activities, fishers catch per unit effort, fish breeding, morphology, resistance to species invasion, wild fish seed supply, fish meal and oil and likelihood of spread of vector-borne diseases. Climate change could also extirpate fish population in lakes. Fishing gears, fishing processing and marketing, fishing periods could be affected and at the extreme total abandonment of artisanal fisheries could occur on account of climate change. Understanding climate change and its impacts on the ecosystem will provide accurate decision, capacity building and adaptive management in tackling the problems as it will provide practical, scientific, technical and socio-economic actions to mitigate the challenges currently and in the future. Study of vulnerability of artisanal fisheries to climate change in the likelihood of episodic events of risk exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity should be the focus of scientific research in this decade. Climate change will produce synergistic and cumulative effects with considerable uncertainty to the extent, magnitude, rate and direction of changes and impacts. Thus, high confidence predictions models of climate change perturbations on fish response in terms of feedbacks, critical thresholds, adaptations, migrations, breeding, and recruitment and so on could mitigate the impacts and ensure sustainability of artisanal fisheries in Nigeria.

Keywords: Artisanal fisheries; Climate change; Impacts; Adaptive management; Ecosystem