Dr Nathalie Hilmi presented a paper entitled The Vulnerability of the Fisheries Sector to Climate Change in the Mediterranean Region to the virtual 96th Annual WEAI Conference on June 27th-July 1st, 2021. She also chaired the session 138.
WEAI is a non-profit, educational community dedicated to sharing economic research and analysis. They publish two quarterly journals—Economic Inquiry and Contemporary Economic Policy—that are purposefully written for as wide a range of readers as possible. Conferences are lively forums for members to share their research and encourage discussion in an inclusive and constructive environment. Approximately 2,000 economists from around the world are members of WEAI. They come from academia, business, government and research to be a part of an organization that champions their diversity of experience and thought.
The paper was about the impacts of the ecological and socio-economic risks on the fisheries in the Mediterranean region from a solely economic point of view. The objective is to study the vulnerability of the fisheries sector in the Med Sea to the different risks. In the first section, the authors analyze the FAO Fishstat data in different countries. They separate the area into three subdivisions due to their different characteristics: Northern Mediterranean countries of Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Greece and Malta, Southern Mediterranean countries of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Eastern Mediterranean countries of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestinian territories and Cyprus. Then they discuss the main environmental risks of warming, ocean acidification, hypoxia, deoxygenation, pollution and habitats loss and socio-economic risks of demography, coastal urban cities, small/industrial fleets, artisanal/recreational fisheries, overfishing, countries’ degree of development, poverty level, jobs related to fisheries to the fisheries in the Mediterranean. In the third section, they implement an econometric model. Finally, they suggest some policy recommendations following our analysis of the observed and projected situation of the fisheries in the Mediterranean region.
