Modeling the Senegalese Artisanal Fishing Migrations

The North-West African coast is enriched by the Canary current, which sustain a very productive marine ecosystem. The Senegalese artisanal fishing fleet, the largest in West Africa, benefit from this particularly productive ecosystem. It has survived the ages with remarkable adaptability, and has great flexibility allowing it to react quickly to changes, in particular by changing fishing gear and performing migrations. However, since the 1980s, the increasing fishing effort led to a progressive fish depletion, increasing fisher’s migration distances to access new fishing grounds. Since 2007 many fishers even started to navigate to Canary archipelago in order to find a more lucrative job in Europe, carrying candidate to emigration in their canoes. This phenomenon further increased since 2022 due to a new drop in fishery yields, consecutive to the development of fishmeal factories along the coast that amplified overfishing. Climate change may also impact fish habitat, and by consequence the distribution of fishing grounds. The question addressed in this research was how climate change, fishing effort and socio-economic parameters interact and determine the artisanal fishery dynamics. An interdisciplinary approach allowed us to collect data and qualitative information on climate, fishing effort and socio-economic parameters. This served as a basis to build a multi-agent model of the mobility of Senegalese artisanal fishing. We implemented a first version of the model and presented some preliminary simulations with contrasted fishing effort and climate scenario. The results suggested that first, climate change should have only a slight impact on artisanal fishing, even in the most extreme climate scenario considered. Second, if fishing effort was maintained at current levels, we found a collapse of the fishery with massive fishers migrations whatever the climate scenario. Third, with reduced fishing effort, a sustainable fishery equilibrium emerges in which Senegal’s artisanal fishery catches ~250,000 tons of fish a year mostly in Senegal, approaching the 2000s catches records. This sustainable equilibrium maintained with the two-climate change scenario tested. Fishers migrations provide clues of the fish populations state and have implications for the sustainable exploitation of fishing resources. Senegalese artisanal fishers’ migrations impact the regional distribution of the fishing effort, therefore must be taken into account in regional development and planning policies for this sector, particularly in a context of increasing infrastructure and spatial management measures (e.g. marine protected areas). This work lays the foundations of a computer simulation tool for decision support.