From Climate Change to Occupational Risks: The Vulnerability of the Fisheries Sector to Climatic Accidents

Abstract

With the increase in global average temperature due to climate change, a large number of workers are exposed to high-temperature working environments. Therefore, this study examines the impacts of fisheries production, consumption of fossil fuels, economic growth, and governance on climatic occupational accidents amid global change in the EU from 1990 to 2022. Using the novel Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR) method with fixed effect components, the findings showed a significant link between the expansion of the fisheries industry and climatic occupational accidents at higher quantiles. The results also showed that developed members in the EU14 believe that the expansion of the fisheries industry has a bigger impact on climatic occupational accidents than developing countries in the EU13. Regarding how the use of fossil fuels affects maritime climatic occupational accidents, it has been shown that the majority of this variable's quantiles are positively correlated with the prevalence of threats. However, in the original and emerging EU13 and EU14 countries, economic development lowers climatic occupational accidents, supporting the growth hypothesis for fisheries-producing nations. The relationship between climatic occupational accidents and governance was found to be significant in the first through the ninth quantiles across the EU27 nations.