Coastal fishing communities in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea are under economic stress due to significant declines in their principal catch of small pelagic fish – fish that live in the open water. The total catch
of small, sardine-like pelagic fish declined by 59 percent in Ghana between 1993 and 2019, and in Côte d’Ivoire by nearly 40 percent between 2003 and 2020. These declines, which have been underway since the 1990s, are in part a result of ocean warming, driven by climate change. Roughly 90 percent of added heat in the atmosphere is absorbed by the ocean, and ocean warming has triggered fish migrations away from the Gulf of Guinea. This problem is made worse due to illegal fishing by Chinese industrial trawlers and over-fishing from traditional local canoes.
Given the certainty of continued ocean warming in the decades ahead, the fish catch decline is likely to continue, even if illegal and excessive fishing can somehow be controlled. Since 2016 the government of
Ghana, followed by Côte d’Ivoire, has tried to revive the fishery by imposing brief seasonal fishing bans (“closed seasons”) on both industrial trawlers and canoes, but these measures have so far failed to reverse the decline in small pelagic fish stocks.