Beneath the surface

Authors

In brief

Indonesia's fisheries are usually described through production, exports and the number of people working at sea. Beneath those figures lies a more fragile story: a warming, less predictable ocean, and with it the livelihoods of coastal workers and fishing communities. Combining official statistics, vessel activity and environmental and geospatial indicators, the authors trace the pathway from climate signal to household vulnerability, and argue that official statistics need to move beyond separate datasets toward evidence systems that connect environmental change with people's lives.

“Who becomes vulnerable when the sea changes?”

What the article covers

• Sea surface temperature, salinity and chlorophyll-a mapped across Indonesian waters for 2004, 2014 and 2024, showing that climate pressure is spatially uneven.
• A clear decline in fisheries potential over those twenty years, with sea temperatures projected to rise by roughly 0.10 to 0.28 degrees within the next two to three decades.
• Two high-risk Fisheries Management Areas: the Arafura Sea, environmentally vulnerable and intensively fished, and the Java Sea, socio-economically vulnerable because small-scale fisheries dominate.
• Why one dataset is not enough, and what labour statistics, household surveys, vessel activity, remote sensing and geospatial layers each contribute that the others cannot.
• The case for official statistics as an anticipatory instrument: identifying who is becoming vulnerable, not only recording what has already happened.

How to cite

Suryo Adi Rakhmawan and I Nyoman Setiawan. “Beneath the surface.” vISIon: The ISI Magazine Vol. 1 No. 2, June 2026, pp. 35–37.