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Climate-resilient aquatic food systems require transformative change to address gender and intersectional inequalities [1]

['Rahma Adam', 'Worldfish Kenya', 'C O International Livestock Research Institute', 'Nairobi', 'Anamika Amani', 'Kit Royal Tropical Institute', 'Amsterdam', 'The Netherlands', 'Rob Kuijpers', 'Katrine Danielsen']

Date: 2024-08

Abstract The adverse impacts of climate change on aquatic food systems (AFS) and the people who depend on AFS for livelihood security are inequitably distributed between and within countries. People facing the highest risks and experiencing the severest impacts of climate change are those who already experience multidimensional inequalities in their lives, particularly because of their gender, class, age, indigeneity, ethnicity, caste, religion, and the physical and political conditions that can create additional vulnerabilities. In this paper, we conducted a scoping review of the literature that explores the links between climate change, gender, and other social identities, and AFS. The review was complemented by an analysis of representative data on women and men aquaculture farmers in Bangladesh from 2018 to 2019. We also analysed data from the 2019 Illuminating Hidden Harvest project. The study relied on the gendered agrifood system and aquatic food climate risk frameworks to guide on literature search, review, and data analyses. Our findings show that intersecting identities disadvantage certain AFS actors, particularly young women from minority ethnic groups, and create challenge for them to manage and adapt to climate shocks and stresses. Examples of gender-responsive and transformative interventions are highlighted from our review to showcase how such intersectional disadvantages can be addressed to increase women’s empowerment and social and gender equality.

Citation: Adam R, Amani A, Kuijpers R, Danielsen K, Smits E, Kruijssen F, et al. (2024) Climate-resilient aquatic food systems require transformative change to address gender and intersectional inequalities. PLOS Clim 3(7): e0000309. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000309 Editor: Ferdous Ahmed, IUBAT: International University of Business Agriculture and Technology, MALAYSIA Received: August 3, 2023; Accepted: May 29, 2024; Published: July 16, 2024 Copyright: © 2024 Adam et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: We have attached the datasets that we have used for this research. They are secondary datasets. Funding: This work was supported by CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform, which is grateful for the support of CGIAR Trust Fund contributors: www.cgiar.org/funders (RA, AA, RK, KD, ES, FK, NM, IZ and CRF) and The CGIAR Initiative on Aquatic Foods (CR and EA). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1. Introduction An aquatic food system according to the WorldFish Centre is “the complex web of all the elements and activities that relate to foods from water, along with parts of the broader economic, social, and natural environments in which they are embedded. It encompasses the steps from production all the way to consumption, as well as outcomes related to nutrition, public health, food security, social and economic prosperity, and environmental sustainability”. Aquatic foods are harvested from inland and marine fisheries or produced through aquaculture. They contribute to global food and nutrition security, poverty alleviation, and economic development [1]. Over the past decades, AFS have been experiencing unprecedented stresses from anthropogenic activities, including over-exploitation of resources, habitat destruction, pollution, and climate change [2,3]. Concerning the latter, rises in temperature, ocean acidification, and climate extremes [4–6], for example, can all have a negative impact on AFS. Under a high-emissions, no-mitigation scenario, lower-income countries in Africa, the Indo-Pacific, and South and Southeast Asia are projected to face high climate risks to nutrition and health, social, economic and environmental outcomes of AFS by 2100 [7,8]. The AFS of higher-income countries are projected to experience low to medium climate risk even though these countries are among the highest emitters of greenhouse gases [7]. Broadly, people who face the highest risks and experience the most severe impacts of climate change are those who already experience multidimensional inequalities [9]. It is particularly pertinent to view risks associated with climate change and people’s abilities to (in)adequately respond to climate change challenges through a gender and intersectional lens due to the ways in which gender and social inequalities get produced and reproduced in AFS and disproportionately disadvantage women and marginalized groups [9,10]. Women are especially vulnerable to challenges created by climate change because of their higher dependence on natural resources [11,12]. Yet women experience limited coping and adaptive capacities to climate change challenges owing to their multiple, competing responsibilities carrying out productive, household, and care work compared to men [12–15]. Unequal gender norms and power relations sustain this status quo [16]. This article investigates how gender, and other social identities, influence the adaptive capacity of AFS in the face of climate change. It explores the abilities of AFS actors to manage climate change risks and build resilience in AFS in gender-equitable ways. This paper addresses the following research questions: (1) How do gender and other social identities impact livelihoods in AFS experiencing climate change challenges? and (2) What are the coping strategies and adaptation and mitigation measures used by women and men whose livelihoods depend on AFS to deal with climate change? To help explore these questions we first developed a conceptual framework that maps how climate shocks and stresses interact with gender and other socio-economic variables to shape AFS outcomes. Guided by this conceptual framework, we conducted a literature search and review from 2017–2022 on empirical studies that examined the interactions between gender and other social identities, climate change, and AFS. This timeframe was chosen to include the most recent research on the topic, while generating a realistic amount of information to process within the scope of the review The key findings from the review highlight how gender and other social identities shape people’s capacities to respond and adapt to climate shocks and stresses in AFS. Finally, we assessed participation rates of women and men in AFS using a global dataset developed by the Illuminating Hidden Harvest project and examined the key factors that influence women’s adaptive capacities and resilience in a major aquaculture-producing country (Bangladesh) as a case study. The overall aim of this paper is to show what we know about women’s participation and resilience in AFS. Good practices were reviewed, and recommendations made based on these good practices.

3. Methodology 3.1 Scoping literature review A scoping review framework was used to carry out the search and review. Scoping reviews identify the different evidence types (qualitative or quantitative) available on a particular topic and integrate this material through mapping or charting [40]. The process was divided into four steps: (1) identifying relevant studies, (2) screening and selecting relevant publications, (3) charting the data and information, and (4) assembling, summarizing, and reporting the results (Fig 2). PPT PowerPoint slide

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TIFF original image Download: Fig 2. The PRISMA flow chart of the selection process for studies that examine climate-resilient aquatic food systems and gender and intersectional inequalities. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000309.g002 We limited our search to primary research articles in English published in peer-reviewed academic journals between January 2017 and October 2022. This timeframe was chosen to include the most recent research on the topic, while generating a realistic amount of information to process within the scope of the review. University of Amsterdam web library databases including Google Scholar, Clarivate Web of Science and Scopus were used. The search string was based on key components of the paper’s conceptual framework: aquatic food (sub-) systems, gendered and intersectional inequalities, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacities, as well as related outcomes and interventions. A total of 14,135 papers were obtained. The software package Cadima was used to identify and delete duplicates, resulting in a final sample of 1,966 original papers. Cadima was further used to screen article abstracts based on the inclusion criteria described below: articles presenting primary qualitative or quantitative data through case studies, or evidence-based reviews. articles with a clear focus on AFS and, articles on gender and intersectional dimensions of climate change. This process resulted in 32 articles for inclusion in our review. Nvivo was used to code the selected articles. They were categorized using the following classification: year of publication, country-specific risk profile [7], methodology, aquatic species focus, means of production (fisheries or aquaculture) (Table 2). Nine papers used quantitative research methods, 19 used qualitative research methods, and 4 used mixed methods. Most papers focus on a small subset of communities or a localised region in the world. The article set was complemented by a purposive literature review to help set the stage in the introduction, and to explain and reflect on the findings. This resulted in a final count of 125 publications. PPT PowerPoint slide

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TIFF original image Download: Table 2. Distribution of included papers by year of publication, location, methodology and sample size. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000309.t002 3.2 Limitations of the scoping review methodology There are a few limitations to the scoping review methodology we employed. First, we limited our search to journal articles in English. This may have had consequences for geographic scope: majority of the papers reviewed focused on Asia and Africa and with the remainder on Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and Oceania. Second, since our literature search focused on academic peer reviewed journal articles, our paper may have failed to capture relevant information in grey literature. Third, the methodological focus of case studies in our literature review sample was mostly qualitative. This may pose limitations to drawing generic conclusions. 3.3 Data and methods for complementary data analysis To complement the scoping literature review, we conducted an analysis of secondary data. First, we used a dataset developed by the Illuminating Hidden Harvests (IHH) project to assess the participation rates of women and men in small-scale fisheries globally (S1 Data). This included household income and expenditure surveys from 78 countries in the period 2008–2018. Data on aquaculture were not collected. The IHH dataset provides sex-disaggregated employment estimates for the pre- harvest, harvest, processing, and trading stages of the fishery value chain, and estimates the number of people involved in small-scale fisheries for subsistence. Regional estimates of employment and subsistence were then estimated by extrapolation from these 78 countries to the regional level using weighted regression analysis and validated through comparison with other global datasets (Additional information 2). We conducted an elaborate search to find representative and gender-disaggregated quantitative data on either aquaculture farmers or small-scale fishers for complementary analyses on gender-based differences in resilience and adaptive capacity but found very limited datasets meeting these requirements. Second, we analysed data collected by the 2019 Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey (BIHS) to explore the linkage between adaptive capacity and resilience of women and men aquaculture farmers. The use of the BIHS is motivated by the importance of Bangladesh as an aquaculture producer, the country-level representativeness of the dataset, and the detailed data related to adaptive capacity and resilience obtained through interviews with both men and women aquaculture farmers. For small-scale fisheries a representative and sex-disaggregated dataset was not available. After isolating households engaged in aquaculture (n = 2,279), we used data from the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) module to carry out our analysis. The WEAI module contained information on both male and female primary decision-makers. We calculated sex-disaggregated average values on variables that are believed to correlate with adaptive capacity and resilience, such as access to resources and information, influence in community decisions, group membership and the time available for non-reproductive work (Additional information 3). To assess whether the differences in means were statistically significant we used t-tests for continuous variables and two-proportion Z-tests for binary variables.

5. Discussion The findings from our scoping literature review and secondary data analyses indicate that women are central yet underrecognized actors in small-scale fishing and aquaculture economies. There is still a very long to go to realize SDG Goal 14 on Life Below Water: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development in ways that strengthen the economies of small-scale AFS actors, and in particular that strengthen the livelihoods, resilience and agency of women in these systems. In response to the widespread perception that state actors and institutions are failing to respond effectively to the decline of the fisheries sector globally, women-led NGOs and fisher organisations are advocating and implementing bottom-up fisheries management tools and policies in countries as diverse as South Africa, Chile, and Mexico [80,112]. Existing gender-responsive policy guidelines such as FAO Voluntary Guidelines on Small-Scale Fisheries, the IHH 2023 report, and the gender integration and intersectionality in food systems research for development guidance note by the CGIAR Research Program on Fish Agri-Food Systems (FISH) [113] are helpful to legitimize such efforts from the actors who are most actively involved in AFS value chains as well as most directly impacted by the impact of climate change. Ensuring women’s freedom to participate actively in meetings on the same terms as men in governance structures must be a strong programmatic objective [114–117]. Looking to the future, gender-responsive and sex-disaggregated macro-level models and projections forecasting the future impacts of climate change on AFS at global and country levels will help to guide global policy and funding priorities. Gender -responsive and sex-disaggregated approach would include balancing involvement of marginalized women and men in maintaining their livelihoods through diversification with adequate financial compensation, and labor-saving and productivity enhancing technologies, improving their resilience to climate change, and securing nutritious food for themselves and their families are important while considering sex, age and other social markers. The review further shows that gender and social inclusion approaches in small-scale AFS are frequently limited to ensuring women participate or gain access to resources to increase their productivity or income. It is rarer for the underlying structural factors that continually reproduce unequal gender norms and relations that marginalise women to be challenged or transformed [12,79,118,119]. Our analysis suggests that AFS interventions and policies need to be more systemic in addressing gender and power inequalities at individual, systemic, informal, and formal dimensions. Some valuable initiatives show what is possible. For instance, several governments have adopted climate-adaptation and mitigation strategies to help manage depleted ecosystem resources and support the most marginalized groups, including women. Studies of oyster fisheries in Ghana and Gambia illustrate how collaboration between government, research organizations, and civil society organizations under the Sustainable Fisheries Management Project boosted coastal oyster fisheries co-management and increased the capacity of poor women and youth oyster harvesters by giving them formal user rights to the protected fisheries area, and recognizing their contribution in maintaining the resources [120,121]. Knowledge development in association with strengthening women’s agency is an important aspect of enhancing the agency of women in general, and marginalized groups of women and men to engage in positive adaptation measures [62]. As part of this, promoting strong women role models through facilitating their transgression of the traditional gender division of labour can be valuable. With support and training, women can successfully take on typically male responsibilities and play an active role in coastal and marine conservation. A women-led NGO in Mexico increased agency and awareness among local fisherwomen and men on marine conservation and provided enabling opportunities for local women to transgress their traditional gender roles through learning new skills such as diving. Women gained respect and decision-making power in their families and in local and regional fisheries forums [117]. In Vietnam, a project which provided well-directed training and support reduced gender biases in fisheries and improved women’s income and active participation. This was facilitated through the involvement of local male leaders and women’s husbands in gender training ([62,97]. Similarly, in Myanmar, government initiatives that supported women’s participation in household decision-making were significantly and positively correlated to improved technical efficiency of aquaculture farms and increased productivity due to the improved ability of households to allocate and organize productive resources optimally [114]. Further examples of successful strategies include training women in improving dried fish production [122], strengthening the co-management of fragile coastal mangrove ecosystem for oyster fisheries [120], developing participatory community-based marine conservation management plans [112], providing loans and training to women fish retailers for value addition in fish products [63,65], and promoting inland fish farming to women and men [62]. For example, in Bangladesh WorldFish promoted women’s ability to manage their ponds using novel learning approaches. This resulted in significantly higher fish productivity, fish diversity, and income generation, as well as improvements in women’s control over income and assets, though wider determinants of women’s empowerment were unaffected [123,124]. Promoting opportunities for fisherwomen to diversify their income beyond fisheries can be valuable. This has been promoted in Bangladesh [125] and in the United Kingdom. Here, women’s work outside fisheries often provides stable income for small-scale fisher households that are increasingly threatened by climate irregularities [88]. We conclude that further evidence-based–and action-orientated—research is needed to inform targeted and place-based climate interventions that address existing power inequalities and work to change social relations towards more equity and inclusion.

6. Conclusion Based on the literature review and the supplementary datasets from Bangladesh and IHH we propose below some key action pathways for research, interventions, and policy to enable and contribute to gender-transformative and climate-resilient AFS. First, policy, research and interventions must address multi-dimensional power inequalities. At the research and intervention levels, it is important to engage both women and men to complement gains in income, food security and livelihood diversification, with increased decision-making power of women on resource allocation and income. Household-based approaches that involve men as well as women are important to strengthen intra-household collaboration on productive and household and care tasks, and to strengthen jointness in decision-making in all domains. At an institutional level, it is important to commit resources and funding for gender sensitisation at community level, and in government and research agencies. This can help to reduce gender inequality in staffing and pay and change attitudes and practices that restrict women’s mobility and active participation in public meetings, consultations, and forums. These are the first steps in creating a transformative change by addressing key normative barriers for gender equality. At the policy level, climate adaptation policy must be informed by women’s contribution to small-scale and subsistence fisheries and aquaculture, the different needs of women and men, improving commercial returns to women and the specific constraints they experience (due to gender, socio-cultural and religious norms, access to and control over resources and labour, and time constraints). Mitigation strategies must be gender-responsive, including balancing the increasing involvement of marginalised women and men in livelihood diversification with adequate financial compensation, and labour-saving and productivity-enhancing technologies. Second, women’s work throughout aquatic food value chains must be recognised, documented, and valued. At intervention/project level, this can be done by integrating gender and intersectionality within the theory of change and collecting–and analysing—sex- and gender-disaggregated data for effective monitoring, evaluation, and learning. At the research level, there is a need for more mixed-methods approaches, value-chain analyses and large-scale quantitative studies on women’s work across the fisheries and aquaculture value chain (pre-production, post-harvest processing and trade), including women’s contribution to subsistence fisheries and to the informal markets. At the policy level, funding and resources should be earmarked for systematic collection of quantitative as well as qualitative data on women’s contributions in aquatic food value chains in order to formulate evidence-based, gender-responsive policies that recognise and utilise the agency and knowledge of marginalised actors. This will facilitate more sustainable and custodial management of aquatic food resources. Third, research on climate change and small-scale fisheries and aquaculture, with a gender and intersectional lens, is critical to determine heterogeneity and agency in the adaptive capacities of AFS actors, and to catalyse activism. This approach opens avenues for interventions and policy that integrate local AFS actors as part of the solution, rather than as the problem, thus bolstering sustainable, equitable and resilient AFS. There should be a specific focus on two factors. The first one is closer interdisciplinary engagement between socio–ecological resilience analysis and gender analysis in research on climate change and AFS. This should combine ongoing efforts to increase and improve the collection of sex-disaggregated data in small-scale fisheries and aquaculture systems research together with developing high-quality gender analysis on socio-ecological dynamics in small-scale fisheries. Second, studies should go beyond a household and gender-dichotomous focus in qualitative and quantitative research for a better understanding of climate change-driven adaptive choices by women and men on livelihood diversification in different contexts. Studies that link gender and AFS research to the fisheries and global political economy through a feminist political economy research agenda could also support women’s activism. This is because women, including indigenous women, have a significant role to play in articulation of climate action strategies.

Acknowledgments This paper is published by the Resilient Aquatic Food Systems for Healthy People and Planet (RAqFS) initiative, led by WorldFish in partnership with the International Water Management Institute, and other CGIAR institutions. RAqFS is a multidisciplinary research-for-development program designed in collaboration with partners and stakeholders to develop and implement research innovations that enhance the contribution of small-scale fisheries and aquaculture to reducing poverty, increasing food and nutrition security, and improving natural resource systems. The work has been done in close collaboration with KIT Royal Tropical Institute. This work was carried out under the CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform.

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