Saving the Fisheries

From the ongoing series the destruction of fisheries is the big unacknowledged environmental catastrophe of today:

An article in this week’s Science Magazine argues that a simple solution works: privatise the fisheries:

Although the potentially harmful consequences of mismanaged fisheries were forecast over 50 years ago (1, 2), evidence of global declines has only been seen quite recently. Reports show increasing human impacts (3) and global collapses in large predatory fishes (4) and other trophic levels (5) in all large marine ecosystems (LMEs) (6). It is now widely believed that these collapses are primarily the result of the mismanagement of fisheries.

[...]

Rather than only setting industry-wide quotas, fishermen are allocated individual rights. Referred to as catch shares or dedicated access privileges, these rights can be manifest as individual (and tradable) harvest quotas, cooperatives, or exclusive spatial harvest rights; the idea is to provide—to fishermen, communities, or cooperatives—a secure asset, which confers stewardship incentives.

[...]

By examining 11,135 global fisheries, we found a strong link: By 2003, the fraction of ITQ-managed [individual transferable quotas] fisheries that were collapsed was about half that of non-ITQ fisheries. This result probably underestimates ITQ benefits, because most ITQ fisheries are young.

Guess what, privatisation works for fisheries too.