Christopher Costello and Steven Gaines: Catch Share Fisheries | Resouces for the Future

Christopher Costello and Steven Gaines were co-authors of a September 2008 paper in Science, "Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse?" Catch shares, sometimes called limited access programs, operate like cap-and-trade systems, with a limit set on the total harvest and exchange of permits among fishermen or others. Here are Costello and Gaines, from a recent commentary at Resources for the Future:

While the United States is an emerging catch share leader (with over 10 catch share fisheries, and many more in development), fewer than two percent of the world’s fisheries operate with catch shares, likely because implementation poses challenges and controversies. Contentious issues include how the rights will be initially distributed, the longevity of the rights, whether consolidation will be allowed, and what additional restrictions should be placed on shareholders (for example, must share owners be fishermen?). A related issue concerns who should capture the economic benefits generated by catch shares, which can be substantial because transferable shares are valued as assets. ...

Design features can also affect ecological performance. Even under catch shares, an incentive may exist to discard low-value species that are inadvertently harvested as “by-catch.”  This becomes a particularly salient problem when species of ecological significance have life-history traits that make them more vulnerable to fishing than the target stocks. ... If by-catch species quotas can be traded, the market provides an incentive to avoid by-catch.

In October 2007, I joined a workshop with market design experts, fisheries scientists, fisheries policy experts and stakeholders to discuss limited access programs. Here are the proceedings.

More on the idea of bycatch quota trading.

More to come on this topic.