Scientists Joshua Abbott and Bryan Leonard with Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and School of Sustainability recently published a paper that provides much-needed insight on sustainable practices for the management of fisheries across the globe.
Around 3 billion people rely on fisheries as their main source of protein, and 39 million people work in the fisheries sector worldwide. But this high demand has often been accompanied by severe overfishing and the destruction of natural ecosystems, depleting these vital natural resources at an alarming rate while jeopardizing livelihoods and sapping industry profits. Fisheries can suffer from management challenges that make it difficult for fishers to reap the benefits of investing in the fish stock instead of harvesting more today, and regulatory approaches to resolve the issue have often suffered from a lack of effective enforcement and have failed to align harvesters’ incentives with biological and economic sustainability.
A suite of innovative solutions known as “rights-based management reforms” have been implemented in many fisheries to address these problems. One rights-based policy, individual transferable quotas (ITQs), provides harvesters — typically vessel owners — with property rights to shares of a seasonal, regulator-determined quota and allows harvesters to trade these rights amongst themselves. By making fishers “shareholders” in the total quota, they also have an incentive to invest in sustainable practices that grow the stock, as it leads to long-term profitability.
But, like most solutions to complex issues, rights-based management reforms for fisheries do not come without potential problems. Abbott and Leonard’s paper, co-authored with Brian Garber-Yonts, a research economist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), examines these potential pitfalls.
Read more:
https://news.asu.edu/20220131-study-sheds-light-sustainable-fishing-management-practices