Identifying Cyclone Impacts on Fishing: A Data-Driven Toolkit for Sustainable and Resilient Fisheries

Tropical cyclones (TCs) can lead to significant social and economic losses, with the fisheries sector being especially vulnerable to their impacts. There is a growing need to develop new methods for impact assessment, especially as regards assessments in real time and impact forecasting. The objective of this paper was to develop an open-source, automated toolkit that can assess the impact of TCs on fishing activity by tracking changes in the number of fishing boats caused by a TC event using publicly available satellite and cyclone intensity data. The toolkit can provide retrospective analyses of how fishing activity was affected in a given country and year, and it can also nowcast/forecast likely fishing activity changes resulting from approaching or hypothetical TCs. The toolkit automates data extraction, processing, and the application of a Vector Generalized Linear Model to estimate a historical relationship between TCs and fishing activity. This relationship can then be used for nowcasting or forecasting likely TC impacts on fishing activity based on TC path, windspeed and translation speed. By providing timely, transparent, and scalable assessments of cyclone-related disruptions, the toolkit contributes to the sustainability and resilience of coastal fisheries and supports proactive risk management and informed policymaking in the face of climate-related hazards.