The impact of climate change and economic development on fisheries in South Africa: a wavelet-based spectral analysis

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of climate change and economic development on the patterns of Fisheries catches in South Africa from 1960 to 2021. Our research employs wavelet-based spectral tools to analyse the time–frequency interrelationships among the variables and these methods differ from conventional econometric and statistical techniques which are strictly confined to the time domain. Our findings reveal that economic development has a positive impact on Fisheries whereas there exists a U-shaped correlation between temperature changes and Fisheries, in which the negative effects of climate change on Fisheries have been diminishing since 2010. Additionally, we observe an inverted U-shaped relationship between temperature changes and economic development, whereby climate change began hampering economic growth in the post-2010 period. We conduct a sensitivity analysis by performing partial wavelet coherence analysis to control for (i) economic growth in the temperatures–Fisheries relationship and (ii) temperatures in the economic development–Fisheries relationship. We discover that the former relationship remains unaffected while the latter relationship becomes significantly weaker. Overall, these findings suggest that while Fisheries have displayed resilience to climate change, rising temperatures have hindered economic development, which may potentially impede the future trajectory of Fisheries catches.