Impact Of Climate Variability on Marine Fisheries: Some Panel Evidence From Coastal Odisha

Abstract

The study aims to analyse how climate variability affects marine fish production in Odisha, a key coastal region of India. To substantiate the objective, data on annual marine fish production from all six coastal districts of Odisha, sourced from the Directorate of Fisheries, Govt. of Odisha. However, the explanatory variables for the study, representing climate variability, include annual average precipitation, temperature, relative humidity, surface pressure, wind speed, and wind direction, with data sourced from the NASA Power Data Access Viewer. The study spans from 2000 to 2022, covering the period for which data is available. Log transformation is applied to mitigate multicollinearity, and then the presence of unit root in the panel data is examined using both common and individual stationarity tests at the intercept and trend level. After confirming the stationarity of the variables at different levels, the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) model is employed. Following this, the first stage heteroscedastic Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) is used for robustness analysis. The study found that marine fishery production in Odisha is positively affected by relative humidity, temperature, surface pressure, and negatively affected by frost days, clear-sky days, precipitation, wind direction, and wind speed. Thus, to optimise production, a robust climate monitoring system should be established to forecast key climatic variables and integrate these insights into fishery management plans and fishing schedules.