Jane Lubchenco Interview | e360

From an interview with NOAA head Jane Lubchenco by Elizabeth Kolbert, published in Yale Environment 360:

e360: Can I talk a little bit about one of NOAA’s other major areas — fisheries. What can NOAA do about a problem that also worries a lot of people?

Lubchenco: NOAA is required by the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Management Act to end overfishing. The important issue is how do we actually accomplish that. Traditional fisheries management has really focused on controlling how many days a year fisherman can fish, what the size of the catch can be, and other related means to control their effort. And that is the way most fisheries are managed, certainly within the United States. There is increasing scientific evidence that an alternate form of fishery management, that has now come to be called “catch shares,” is in fact more effective and produces better results at achieving sustainable fisheries and healthy ecosystems. ...

e360: Can you explain a little bit about that for folks who aren’t familiar with how that approach works?

Lubchenco: The shares of the fishery are allocated to entities — those might be fishermen, or boats, or communities — and let’s say that fishermen have a guaranteed fraction of the catch that is their privilege to catch every year. So the total amount of fish that can be caught in any year is divided into these fractions. For example you might be allocated 10 percent of the total catch for the year, I might be allocated 5 percent of the total catch for the year. ... Many fishermen are concerned with the problem of consolidation, where a few people would buy up all the shares. You can structure the rules of fisheries to limit that happening. ...

[T]here has been a lot of resistance to catch shares, because they are new, because there is fear of this initial allocation — there are inevitable winners and losers in the allocation — and because there is a lot of uncertainty about them. They also require having good monitoring, and good mechanisms for data collection, and so there have been economic impediments to implementing catch shares. ...

e360: One other question. Are there any other big issues on NOAA’s plate right now that I should have asked you about and didn’t?

Lubchenco: There are a number of other issues that we might follow up with at a different time — marine spatial planning and ecosystem-based management are two of them that loom large.