The blue paradox: Preemptive overfishing in marine reserves

Abstract

Most large-scale conservation policies are anticipated or announced in advance. This risks the possibility of preemptive resource extraction before the conservation intervention goes into force. We use a high-resolution dataset of satellite-based fishing activity to show that anticipation of an impending no-take marine reserve undermines the policy by triggering an unintended race-to-fish. We study one of the world's largest marine reserves, the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), and find that fishers more than doubled their fishing effort once this area was earmarked for eventual protected status. The additional fishing effort resulted in an impoverished starting point for PIPA equivalent to 1.5 y of banned fishing. Extrapolating this behavior globally, we estimate that if other marine reserve announcements were to trigger similar preemptive fishing, this could temporarily increase the share of overextracted fisheries from 65% to 72%. Our findings have implications for general conservation efforts as well as the methods that scientists use to monitor and evaluate policy efficacy.

Role of economics in analyzing the environment and sustainable development

“…Environmental issues span the gamut from quite local (e.g., communal use of a fishery, forest, or grazing lands) to global (e.g., climate change and ozone depletion) and involve complex feedbacks between social and ecological systems (86). Well-designed institutions can create incentives that drive performance toward desirable outcomes, or if ill designed can lead to poor outcomes (87). How can we design effective international environmental agreements for global environmental issues in a world of nation states?…”

Estimating the economic benefits and costs of highly‐protected marine protected areas

“…The announcement of an MPA has also been shown to increase fishing effort before the MPA is implemented (McDermott et al. ). This is due to fishers anticipating the policy change.…”

“…Marine protected areas can also impose ecological costs, such as concentrating fishing effort outside their borders, or displacing fishing effort from well-managed systems to less well-managed systems-fisheries managed by multiple jurisdictions or fished by multiple nations can be particularly vulnerable to these impacts (Sarmiento 2006, Chan andPan 2016). The announcement of an MPA has also been shown to increase fishing effort before the MPA is implemented (McDermott et al 2019). This is due to fishers anticipating the policy change.…”

Reply to Hanich et al.: Alternate explanations for the blue paradox do not withstand statistical scrutiny

“…Hanich et al's (2) chief criticism relates to the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which they claim drove the preclosure surge in fishing activity within the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA). There are two problems with this argument as it pertains to the findings in McDermott et al (1). The first is that we already control for the confounding effects of ENSO in our original analysis.…”

“…A primary goal of McDermott et al (1) was to stimulate discussion of the "blue paradox" among proponents of marine reserves. We welcome the chance to engage with conservation experts and are grateful for the commentary provided by Hanich et al (2).…”