Climate change adaptation and fishers’ subjective well-being in Indonesia: Is there a link?

Climate change adaptation is crucial to sustaining fishers’ livelihood and well-being. However, no studies have investigated the nexus between climate change adaptation and fishers’ subjective well-being. This study aims to fill the gap by investigating the effect of climate change adaptation on fishers’ subjective well-being proxied by happiness and life satisfaction. In this study, climate change adaption refers to fishing-related practices implemented by fishers to address the climate change impact. The aim is to improve fishing productivity, such as by increasing fishing intensity, adjusting fishing times, locations, and gears, and adopting fish-aggregating and fish-finder devices. We used cross-sectional data from 301 smallholder fishers in East Java, Indonesia, and employed a conditional mixed process (CMP) to tackle the endogeneity arising from the selection bias. The empirical results show that adaptation to climate change improves fishers’ happiness and life satisfaction significantly. The heterogeneous analysis indicates that climate change adaptation positively and significantly affects happiness among fishers with low and middle income (income tertiles 1 and 2). The positive and significant impact on life satisfaction only happens at the middle-income level (income tertile 2). Therefore, we suggest promoting climate change adaptation among smallholder fishers to improve their subjective well-being and boost the sector’s economic development.