Dataset Information

The effect of rights-based fisheries management on risk taking and fishing safety.

ABSTRACT: Commercial fishing is a dangerous occupation despite decades of regulatory initiatives aimed at making it safer. We posit that rights-based fisheries management (the individual allocation of fishing quota to vessels or fishing entities, also called catch shares) can improve safety by solving many of the problems associated with the competitive race to fish experienced in fisheries around the world. The competitive nature of such fisheries results in risky behavior such as fishing in poor weather, overloading vessels with fishing gear, and neglecting maintenance. Although not necessarily intended to address safety issues, catch shares eliminate many of the economic incentives to fish as rapidly as possible. We develop a dataset and methods to empirically evaluate the effects of the adoption of catch shares management on a particularly risky type of behavior: the propensity to fish in stormy weather. After catch shares was implemented in an economically important US West Coast fishery, a fisherman's probability of taking a fishing trip in high wind conditions decreased by 82% compared with only 31% in the former race to fish fishery. Overall, catch shares caused the average annual rate of fishing on high wind days to decrease by 79%. These results are evidence that institutional changes can significantly reduce individual, voluntary risk exposure and result in safer fisheries.

SUBMITTER: Pfeiffer L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4791003 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The effect of rights-based fisheries management on risk taking and fishing safety.

Pfeiffer Lisa L Gratz Trevor T

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20160216 10

Commercial fishing is a dangerous occupation despite decades of regulatory initiatives aimed at making it safer. We posit that rights-based fisheries management (the individual allocation of fishing quota to vessels or fishing entities, also called catch shares) can improve safety by solving many of the problems associated with the competitive race to fish experienced in fisheries around the world. The competitive nature of such fisheries results in risky behavior such as fishing in poor weather ...[more]

PMID: 26884188

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Project description:Natural resource management is evolving toward holistic, ecosystem-based approaches to decision making. The ecosystem science underpinning these approaches needs to account for the complexity of multiple interacting components within and across coupled natural-human systems. In this research, we investigate the potential economic and ecological gains from adopting ecosystem-based approaches for the sardine and anchovy fisheries off of the coast of California, USA. Research has shown that while predators in this system are likely substituting one forage species for another, the assemblage of sardine and anchovy can be a significant driver of predator populations. Currently, the harvest control rules for sardine and anchovy fisheries align more with traditional single species framework. We ask what are the economic and ecological gains when jointly determining the harvest control rules for both forage fish stocks and their predators relative to the status quo? What are the implications of synchronous and anti-synchronous environmental recruitment variation between the anchovy and sardine stocks on optimal food-web management? To investigate these questions, we develop an economic-ecological model for sardine, anchovy, a harvested predator (halibut), and an endangered predator (Brown Pelican) that includes recruitment variability over time driven by changing environmental conditions. Utilizing large-scale numerical optimal control methods, we investigate how the multiple variants of integrated management of sardine, anchovy, and halibut impact the overall economic condition of the fisheries and Brown Pelican populations over time. We find significant gains in moving to integrated catch control rules both in terms of the economic gains of the fished stocks, and in terms of the impacts on the Brown Pelican populations. We also compare the relative performance of current stylized catch control rules to optimal single species and optimal ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) across ecological and economic dimensions, where the former trade-off considerable economic value for ecological goals. More generally, we demonstrate how EBFM approaches introduce and integrate additional management levers for policymakers to achieve non-fishery objectives at lowest costs to the fishing sectors.

Dataset Information

The effect of rights-based fisheries management on risk taking and fishing safety.

Publications

The effect of rights-based fisheries management on risk taking and fishing safety.

Similar Datasets

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