The ethno-oceanography of Tanzanian coastal fishermen: implications for coastal management

Aswani, Shankar; Popova, Ekaterina; Coupland, Jack; Taylor, Sarah; Khumalo, Brian

The ethno-oceanography of Tanzanian coastal fishermen: implications for coastal management

Aswani, Shankar; Popova, Ekaterina ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2012-708X; Coupland, Jack; Taylor, Sarah; Khumalo, Brian. 2025 The ethno-oceanography of Tanzanian coastal fishermen: implications for coastal management. Regional Environmental Change, 25 (4). 10.1007/s10113-025-02436-3

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-025-02436-3

Abstract/Summary

This study investigates how Tanzanian coastal fishermen’s ethno-oceanographic knowledge intersects with, complements, or diverges from scientific understandings of environmental variability and change. We adopt a pragmatic approach to knowledge integration—leveraging local insights to enhance the contextual relevance, cultural legitimacy, and community uptake of climate adaptation and coastal management strategies. In particular, we evaluated the directionality and periodicity of local environmental changes that coastal fishermen reported, as well as their qualitative capacity to identify both short-term and long-term ecological and oceanographic changes. Several coastal communities in Tanzania participated in the assessment, which included survey interviews, participatory mapping, and a household questionnaire on coastal vulnerability. Findings suggest that although local fishermen are able to identify some strong indicators of the region’s natural environmental and oceanic variability (because of multidecadal oscillations like El Niño and the Indian Ocean Dipole [IOD]), they are less likely to identify fine-grained oceanographic signs of anthropogenic climate change until they become noticeably more pronounced over the next few decades. Our aim is to identify pathways for more comprehensive and grounded environmental governance in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) region, where coastal communities face increasing socio-ecological pressures.

Item Type:

Publication - Article

Digital Object Identifier (DOI):

10.1007/s10113-025-02436-3

ISSN:

1436-3798

Additional Keywords:

Ethno-oceanography, Coastal management, Fishermen, Integrative sciences, Western Indian Ocean

NORA Subject Terms:

Marine Sciences

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