'There are less fish in the sea': Extreme weather takes a toll on Mumbai's fishermen

The fishing boats slowly pull into the bustling dock in northern Mumbai on India's west coast, carrying a fresh catch after spending hours at sea trying to net as many fish as possible. Those waiting on the shore look on anxiously. 

Members of Mumbai's Koli community, who have been fishing these waters for generations, have been struggling to deal with an increasingly unfamiliar and volatile Arabian Sea, where warming temperatures are producing more frequent extreme cyclone events, disrupting fish habitats and marine ecosystems along the way. 

On the dock, Prema Baliram Koli, 50, stood surveying with dismay the 14 crates her helpers deposited at her feet. 

"Fishing nowadays is not the same. Sometimes we only get one or two crates of fish, when a good day is 40 or 50 crates," she said, shaking her head at the day's lacklustre haul. 

As she and other women worked on the dock to sort and clean the fish, Koli predicted the next few days would bring an even more disappointing catch. Expenses to maintain and run her boats are increasing, she said, while the fishing days available to her and her community are dwindling. 

"The rest of the time the boat is lying at the harbour for four or five days at a stretch." 

Kashinath Budiya Koli echoed her statements, saying that the price for the dried fish his community is known for was down, but expenses continued to rise. 

"There are less fish in the sea," said the 62-year old longtime fisherman. "We now catch less than 10 per cent of what we used to catch." 

Both Kashinath and Prema grew up with fishing in their blood in a cluster of villages on northern Mumbai's Madh island, where the entire community is worried about changes in the waters they know so well. 

The Arabian Sea is part of the Indian Ocean, which, since the 1950s, has seen the fastest spike in surface temperatures of any ocean, warming at 0.11°C per decade, according to reports issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  

The warming patterns as a result of climate change have provoked cascading effects on coastal ecosystems, said Medha Deshpande, a scientist with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. 

"The Arabian Sea was very calm and quiet in the past," she told CBC News in an interview at the Pune-based government institute. 

"But now the increase in the ocean temperature … is giving birth to more cyclones."

The tropical cyclones are also more intense, given the combination of warming water, rising global temperatures that have raised the air's capacity to hold moisture and the instability in the atmosphere, which creates the storm clouds, Deshpande said.