Despite binding obligations under international human rights and environmental law, states consistently fail to protect the rights of fisher peoples. Instead of addressing the root causes of the climate crisis, governments continue to promote so-called climate change solutions that entrench inequality and dispossession.
Ahead of the summit – held in parallel to the official UN Climate Change Conference – a new report by FIAN International and the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP), Rising Tides, Shrinking Coasts, and Sinking Rights: Climate Crisis and the Struggles of Fisher Peoples, reveals how the climate crisis is undermining the livelihoods, food systems, and cultures of millions of fisher peoples and coastal communities.
Based on ten case studies from Bangladesh, Belize, Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, the report demonstrates that the climate crisis is already a human rights emergency. Across all regions, fisher peoples, collectors, and coastal communities report systematic violations of their rights to food and nutrition, territories, housing, health, and culture.
Fishing and coastal communities have already made many concessions to their governments on access to fisheries. Now they are on the frontlines of the climate catastrophe and they demand real solutions. This is a defining moment for how this global resource – the ocean, lakes and rivers – are managed for future generations.
Right to food and nutrition under threat
Millions of livelihoods are threatened by a range of false climate change solutions, ranging from Marine Protected Areas that exclude traditional fishers and carbon credit schemes that enable resource grabbing, to industrial aquaculture promoted under the guise of food security or climate resilience and large-scale infrastructure projects that serve corporate interests.
“Carbon credit projects are being sold as climate solutions but in reality they displace fishing communities and privatize the mangroves that sustain life. In Thailand, corporations now plant monoculture mangroves for carbon profit while erasing the diverse ecosystems and community rights that have protected these coasts for generations,” said Ravadee Prasertcharoensuk from Sustainable Development Foundation, Thailand, a national member of WFFP.
“Under the banner of ‘blue carbon,’ the state hands over public lands to private investors, leaving only 20 percent of the benefits to the people who have lived and cared for these forests. Climate justice cannot be built on exclusion and greenwashing—it begins with restoring community control and recognizing that the real climate custodians are the people of the mangroves.
The report reveals how core elements of the right to food and nutrition – availability, accessibility, adequacy, and sustainability – are increasingly under threat. As ecosystems collapse under climate change and fish stocks decline, fisher peoples who have long acted as guardians of biodiversity and coastal ecosystem, and as providers of nutritious food, are being displaced from their territories and deprived of their livelihoods.
Many are now forced into precarious forms of labor or are made dependent on inadequate and inconsistent external aid. This further undermines both their right to food and nutrition and their food sovereignty.
Despite the worsening crisis, states – often in close partnership with private corporations – continue to exclude fisher peoples from climate policy and decision-making. Instead of supporting community-led adaptation strategies grounded in human rights and local knowledge, they continue to promote top-down interventions that exacerbate inequality and marginalization.
A call for rights-based climate action
For decades, the peoples of the sea and the mangroves have resisted the theft of our lands and the destruction of our ecosystems. In Ecuador, we have replanted mangroves, defended our coasts, and demanded justice for the social and ecological debt owed to our communities.
“From the womb of the mangrove and the sea,” said Líder Góngora, director of Coordinadora Nacional para la Defensa del Ecosistema Manglar in Ecuador, “we, the gatherers and fisher peoples, have been restoring the mangrove ecosystem – a national public treasure and the heart of our life and culture – through our own socio-ecological efforts since the late 1980s.”
“Our struggle is collective. It rises in defiance of the criminal shrimp industry in Ecuador and across the world. We defend our living spaces, our legends, and our ancestral stories rooted in the marine territories that sustain us.”
True restoration means restitution: returning stolen territories and protecting the peoples who have cared for them with love and resilience for generations.
FIAN International and WFFP urge all states and intergovernmental organizations to fulfil their human rights obligations, including under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas.
Genuine solutions must recognize fisher peoples as rights-holders, knowledge-holders, and key actors in the struggle for climate justice, food sovereignty, and the protection of aquatic ecosystems.
For more information please contact Yifang Slot-Tang slot-tang@fian.org
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