Temporal associations between climate, socioeconomic drivers, and capture fisheries production in Kenya: a national-scale analysis

This study investigates the temporal associations between environmental and socioeconomic variables and capture fisheries production, aiming to guide sustainable fisheries management and policy development. Despite a growing body of literature on Kenya’s fisheries sector, the long-term national-scale lag structure, direction, and magnitude of temporal associations between capture fisheries production and its environmental and socioeconomic drivers remain poorly understood. To achieve this, various statistical techniques were employed to uncover these relationships. The Mann–Kendall test indicated significant increasing trends in mean annual temperature, greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), domestic credit to the private sector, agricultural land use, and population density, with no trend in freshwater withdrawals. Augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) test indicated stationarity for mean annual temperature and non-stationarity for all other predictors; while ARIMA differencing orders for pre-whitening were selected using automated information-criterion optimisation. Cross-correlation analysis identified a significant negative association between GHG emissions and capture fisheries production at a six-year lag ( r = -0.40), suggesting that increases in GHG emissions preceded declines in capture fisheries production. Agricultural land use and domestic credit to the private sector exhibited significant lagged associations with capture fisheries production, whereas annual mean temperature and population density demonstrated negative but statistically non-significant correlations. These findings highlight that fisheries sustainability in Kenya appears to be associated with complex, time-lagged interactions between environmental and socioeconomic factors. Although the observed lagged associations do not establish causality, they underscore the importance of integrated management strategies that align fisheries governance with climate action, sustainable land-use planning, and environmentally responsible financial policies. Accounting for delayed responses to environmental and socioeconomic change may be critical for enhancing the resilience and long-term sustainability of Kenya’s capture fisheries.