Economic impact of ocean acidification on shellfish production in Europe

Abstract

Ocean acidification (OA) is increasingly recognized as a major global problem. Despite the scientific evidence, economic assessments of its effects are few. This analysis is an attempt to perform a national and sub-national assessment of the economic impact of OA on mollusc production in Europe. We focus on mollusc production because the scientific evidence on the biological impact on calcifying organisms is ample relative to other types of marine organisms. In addition, Europe and its regions are significant producers of marine molluscs. By performing a partialequilibrium analysis, we show that the highest levels of overall impact are found in the countries with the largest current production, such as France, Italy and Spain. For Europe as a whole, the annual impact will be over 1 billion USD in 2100. Due to the different production foci of the individual countries and their regions, the distribution of the impact is extremely uneven across countries and their respective regions, with the most affected sub-national regions being those on the Atlantic coast of France, which is an important region for oyster production.

Potential socioeconomic impacts from ocean acidification and climate change effects on Atlantic Canadian fisheries

“…The findings of this assessment contrast with previous socioeconomic analyses of OA effects on fisheries. In previous assessments of OA impacts [11][12][13][14][15][16][17], projected changes in fisheries have been presented almost exclusively as declines in potential landings with subsequent impacts on societies and economies. However, the majority of these studies investigated OA impacts in isolation from other facets of climate change and did not account for potential multi-stressor impacts.…”

“…There is a body of emerging literature seeking to address how OA may affect human systems by linking projected biological responses to OA with ecosystem services such as fisheries production. To date, socioeconomic OA impact research has been undertaken at a range of scales and resolutions from international [11][12][13] to national [14][15][16] and sub-national [17]. These studies have generally focused on OA in isolation from other climate change effects, and predicted declines in revenues and higher social risk in regions where shellfish fisheries are proportionally more important.…”

The economic impacts of ocean acidification on shellfish fisheries and aquaculture in the United Kingdom

“…We have used 3.5% social discount rate as recommended by the UK Treasury (HM Treasury, 2003) for forward projection. We have also assumed that the onset of ocean acidification affects both wild-capture shellfish and those derived from aquaculture equally, and that the rate of harvest loss of shellfish is proportional to the decrease in calcification rate due to ocean acidification, in line with assumptions made in Cooley and Doney (2009), Narita et al (2012) and Narita and Rehdanz (2016). Thus, the aggregate economic losses in provisioning services for 2100 were calculated at 2013 prices together with the emission scenarios and the biological responses (effect sizes) of molluscs and crustaceans.…”

“…The potential direct costs of shellfish loss due to ocean acidification would also affect macroeconomic elements (such as output, income and employment), and therefore we applied a partial-equilibrium (PE) analysis to assess the wider impacts of ocean acidification on molluscs and crustaceans (Narital et al, 2012;Narita and Rehdanz, 2016). The PE framework measures the welfare losses due to reduced production and consumption, and the welfare effects of price increase under reduced supply due to ocean acidification.…”

“…However, comparatively little research has been undertaken to date regarding the implications of ocean acidification for commercial finfish and shellfish supply to markets (Fabry et al, 2008) except for the studies by Cooley and Doney (2009), Narita et al (2012), Narita and Rehdanz (2016) and Fernandes et al, (2016). There is need to undertake economic studies to estimate the overall welfare impacts resulting from ocean acidification on significant markets such as fisheries, aquaculture and tourism.…”