Emmy Fitri – Nine years ago, long before Al Gore warned the world about the "Inconvenient Truth" of global warming, Edy Hamdan and fellow fishermen in Krui, West Lampung, had already accepted the fact that their reading of the moon and stars was no longer helpful in hauling in a big catch.

In the past, with his 9-meter-long fiber boat, Edy could bring home one to two tons of fish during high season. Now, he often returns home empty-handed.

The tradition of looking up to the sky for hints to where the fish would be was once treasured knowledge fishermen passed on from generation to generation. But it stopped being effective and nobody knew why, until in 2005, when a climate change awareness campaign reached their remote village on the southernmost tip of Lampung. Now, Edy knows that global warming is to blame.

"It's getting harder and harder to catch big fish like tuna and ikan pari [rayfish] because the water temperatures are now unpredictable – either warmer or colder – and the adult fish have tended to migrate to other habitats," Edy said.

"The wind is also changing so fast that our reading of the stars is not helping at all. These days, we sail off early in the morning but rush home before noon with nothing caught because of rapidly changing winds."

Recognized as the world's greatest maritime country, Indonesia is made up of almost 62 percent sea, and millions of people living along the coastlines rely on fishing for their livelihood. But according to data from the Ministry of Fisheries and Maritime Affairs, 80 percent of 3.4 million fishermen in the country are categorized as small-scale fishermen who are most vulnerable to the impacts of global warming.

The changes in sea temperatures, the wind and the waves, according to experts, are the results of global warming and conditions vary from one area to another. And so fishermen must think of other ways to survive. And mostly they resort to borrowing money.

A fisherman in Muara Angke in North Jakarta, Salim, is mired in debt because he no longer earns the income he used to. His life began to change in 2003, when the waves suddenly became unfriendly and the wind blew harder than ever.

"We'd stay at home for days waiting for calmer water because we didn't want to speculate and waste our expensive fuel for nothing," Salim said.

Even worse, his neighborhood suffers from more frequent tidal flooding. "That used to happen once a month but now it hits us three times a month," he said.

Desperate, Edy tried a new approach. He spent Rp 20 million ($2,127) he had saved over the years to modify his fishing net. And it has paid off – slowly. "Regardless of the wind and sea temperature, we can bring home a few kilos of fish now, smaller ones, because the net has smaller holes than the old ones," he said.

"My income is drastically smaller compared to the early 2000s, but it's better than nothing, because the debts I ran up just to buy food were continuing to mount."

The use of finer fishing nets, however helpful for fishermen like Edy, is not a recommended sustainable fishing practice as it contributes to the fast depletion of fish stocks. But, with no other skills or money to start a new business, Edy feels he has no choice. He has a family to feed.