Human health alters the sustainability of fishing practices in East Africa

We accept that the environment influences human health, but we know little about how human health affects the environment. However, millions of people around the world rely on natural resources for food and livelihoods and confront a high burden of illness. Experience of illness may change people’s physical capacities, outlook, and planning horizons and shape how they engage with the environment. We analyze these impacts in fishing communities of Lake Victoria, Kenya. Although illness may cause the sickest individuals not to fish, many fishers continue fishing but shift their methods. When sick, fishers use methods that are less physically demanding but illegal and environmentally destructive. Our findings suggest that environmental sustainability may be integrally shaped by the health of resource users.

Understanding feedbacks between human and environmental health is critical for the millions who cope with recurrent illness and rely directly on natural resources for sustenance. Although studies have examined how environmental degradation exacerbates infectious disease, the effects of human health on our use of the environment remains unexplored. Human illness is often tacitly assumed to reduce human impacts on the environment. By this logic, ill people reduce the time and effort that they put into extractive livelihoods and, thereby, their impact on natural resources. We followed 303 households living on Lake Victoria, Kenya over four time points to examine how illness influenced fishing. Using fixed effect conditional logit models to control for individual-level and time-invariant factors, we analyzed the effect of illness on fishing effort and methods. Illness among individuals who listed fishing as their primary occupation affected their participation in fishing. However, among active fishers, we found limited evidence that illness reduced fishing effort. Instead, ill fishers shifted their fishing methods. When ill, fishers were more likely to use methods that were illegal, destructive, and concentrated in inshore areas but required less travel and energy. Ill fishers were also less likely to fish using legal methods that are physically demanding, require travel to deep waters, and are considered more sustainable. By altering the physical capacity and outlook of fishers, human illness shifted their effort, their engagement with natural resources, and the sustainability of their actions. These findings show a previously unexplored pathway through which poor human health may negatively impact the environment.