Coastal Livelihoods Erode as Overfishing and Climate Disruption Converge on the Indian Ocean
A convergence of illegal industrial fishing and accelerating climate disruption is systematically dismantling the livelihoods of artisanal coastal communities along East Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, exposing critical failures in maritime governance, enforcement capacity, and regional fisheries management that carry direct lessons for West Africa’s own coastal economies.
The 2026 State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report, published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), places the scale of the crisis in stark statistical relief: 37% of assessed marine fish stocks globally are now overfished. In the Western Indian Ocean specifically, more than half of key commercial species, including red and white snapper, are already fully exploited. The warning lands at a moment when El Niño-linked ocean warming is adding thermal stress to ecosystems already weakened by decades of extraction.
For fishermen like Abdulrizak Salim, who built a fleet of more than ten boats along the Kenyan coast, the numbers are not abstractions. Operating costs for a single vessel can reach KES 10,000 per outing. With ten boats, a week of poor catches translates to KES 1 million in losses. “Instead of moving forward, you go backwards,” Salim said. “The fish have decreased enormously.”
The Governance Gap: Illegal Fishing and Enforcement Deficits
Kenya’s State Department for Blue Economy estimates that 40% of all fish caught in the country originate from illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing operations, costing the national economy up to KES 45 billion annually in lost revenue. That figure is not merely a fiscal concern. It represents a structural failure in maritime governance with direct parallels across West African littoral states, from Senegal’s artisanal fishing communities to Ghana’s tuna sector and Nigeria’s sprawling delta coastline.
Kenyan law mandates that industrial fishing vessels carry Automatic Identification System (AIS) tracking devices transmitting real-time location data to the Kenya Fisheries Service. Bottom-trawlers are legally prohibited from operating within the five-nautical-mile zone reserved for artisanal fishermen. Compliance, however, remains dangerously low. Robert Wanyama, Assistant Director at the Kenya Fisheries Service, put industrial vessel compliance at approximately 60%. “You will find that foreign fishing vessels, while in our waters, will switch off their AIS so that we are not able to see them,” Wanyama said.
Dark vessels. Silent. Untracked. Their nets drag along the seabed, destroying ancient coral formations and flattening marine habitats that took centuries to form. A 2022 joint study by the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, The Nature Conservancy, and Lancaster Environment Centre found that 75% of all catch from bottom trawling operations is bycatch: juvenile fish, dolphins, and endangered sea turtles, scooped up and discarded. David Mulwa, a former casual worker on an industrial trawler operating in the Malindi-Ungwana Bay, described the economic logic driving this destruction. The vessels were not targeting table fish. They were targeting lobster, priced at over US$100 per kilogram on export markets. “If they get one or two lobsters, their day is fine,” Mulwa said. “But I, who need the ordinary fish, am the one who suffers.”
Climate Stress Amplifies Structural Vulnerabilities
Professor Manuel Barange, Director of Fisheries and Aquaculture at FAO, offered a precise analogy for what overfishing means in ecological terms. “Imagine you have money in a bank and the bank gives you interest. Overfishing means you are removing from your account more than the interest. The interest in this case is what nature provides: the growth of populations, new entries. If we keep biting into the capital, that resource will produce less and less.”
Climate change compounds this depletion through a slower but equally destructive mechanism. Warming oceans alter current patterns, displace fish populations, and degrade coral reef ecosystems that serve as nurseries for commercial species. Professor Christina Hicks of the Lancaster Environment Centre identified the convergence as a governance emergency. “We are entering an El Niño year, so we are going to feel really significant impacts of climate change. That adds increasing pressure on an already stressed system,” she said. “The urgency of action on these two topics is critical now.”
For coastal households, the consequences are immediate and intimate. Kadzo Katsutsu, a resident of Malindi, described the impossible arithmetic of a collapsing fishing economy meeting the fixed costs of secondary school education. “They do not want to understand that their parent’s business has collapsed,” she said. “We are truly suffering.”
The Mombasa Declaration and the Architecture of Accountability
On 16 June 2025, nations convened at the 11th Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, adopted a collective declaration pledging to combat IUU fishing through a set of concrete institutional commitments. Signatories agreed to modernize vessel registries, publish fishing authorizations, and share data to enable tracking of global vessel ownership and activity. The declaration represents a meaningful institutional step, though its value will ultimately be measured against implementation timelines and enforcement mechanisms rather than the text of the pledge itself.
Maisie Pigeon, Director of the Coalition for Fisheries Transparency, framed the governance challenge in terms of inclusive decision-making architecture. “Sustainable fisheries are profitable fisheries,” she said. “Ensuring that all stakeholders have a voice at the table is how fisheries decision-making should be made.” The statement carries particular weight in the West African context, where artisanal fishing communities, frequently excluded from licensing negotiations and industrial concession agreements, bear the greatest cost of governance failures they had no hand in creating.
FAO is actively developing low-investment management systems that governments can deploy to regulate fishing effort. Professor Barange described two core instruments: controlling the number of vessels licensed to fish, and limiting the number of operational days per month. “It is in the end the decision of the government to exploit the resources in the way they see fit,” he said, a framing that places sovereign accountability at the center of any durable solution.
Regional Integration as a Fisheries Governance Instrument
West Africa’s fisheries governance architecture remains fragmented. ECOWAS has not yet developed a binding regional fisheries management protocol comparable to the European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy, leaving member states to negotiate access agreements with industrial fishing fleets, including Chinese, European, and Russian operators, on largely bilateral terms. Senegal, Ghana, and Mauritania each maintain separate licensing regimes, creating regulatory arbitrage opportunities that foreign industrial fleets exploit systematically.
The Fisheries Committee for the West Central Gulf of Guinea (FCWC) provides a partial coordination mechanism, but its monitoring, control, and surveillance capacity remains under-resourced relative to the scale of IUU activity in the region. Ghana’s Fisheries Commission has documented significant illegal fishing pressure in its Exclusive Economic Zone, including vessel flag-hopping and transhipment at sea that circumvents port-state controls. Nigeria’s vast maritime jurisdiction presents an even more acute enforcement deficit.
The AfCFTA’s Protocol on Trade in Services, currently under negotiation, could in principle create a framework for harmonized maritime services regulation, including fisheries monitoring standards. Whether ECOWAS member states will use that architecture to build shared surveillance infrastructure, joint patrol capacity, or common vessel registry standards remains an open institutional question with concrete economic stakes. The FAO’s 37% overfishing statistic is not a distant warning. It is an active depletion curve. Each season of inadequate enforcement is a season of irreversible capital destruction in the marine commons that coastal West African economies depend upon for food security, employment, and export revenue.
