Geog 300i 1st Edition Lecture 7 Current LectureGlobal Fishing Crisis- Flothmann et alo Illegal and unreported fishing alone accounts for catches worth as much as $23.5 billion annually; this represents an estimated 11 to 26 million tons of fish, equivalent to about one-fifth of the global reported catch. o Crucially, the more fish stocks are exploited, the more the proportion of illegal catch appears to increase.o Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, control of a vessel’s activities is the responsibility of the “flag state” to which that vessel is registered.o International governance bodies have recently turned to port states to help prevent IUU-caught fish from entering international trade and key markets.o 2009 Port State Measures Agreement to prohibit the landing of IUU fish, and to deny port services to vessels that have been engaged in and supporting IUU fishing activitieso Can the Port State Measures Agreement work?o The authors collect data from publicly available sources on known Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU)-listed vessels to assess how well port authorities deal with them.o They find that the agreement will likely be ineffective under current conditions.o There are three reasons. o insufficient vessel information, o There are no mandatory unique identifiers for fishing vesselso Lack of compliance by port stateso “Of the 425 port visits by IUU-listed vessels, 219 were to states that were members of the RFMO that listed the vessel. These vessels should have been identified and subjected to port state measures. However, port states only fulfilled their obligations in one out of every four cases. Why?o (i) officials unaware of the IUU status of vessels visiting their ports; o (ii) officials did not consistently report information on visits by IUU-listed vessels or port state actions to national fisheries authorities; o (iii) measures adopted by RFMOs not translated into national law, so limited ability of the authorities to legally execute measures. o At the regional level, most RFMOs did not request information on visits by IUU-listed vessels to the ports of their member states, nor assess the compliance of their members These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor’s lecture. GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes, not as a substitute.with port state measures. No measures to sanction members for failing to meet their obligations. ”o Absence of consistent port state measures across regions.o “The regional application of current port state measures allows IUU-listed vessels simply to move to other regions when measures are enforced.- Costello et alo looks at a large number of fisheries institutions and catch statistics (11,135 fisheries from1950 to 2003).o The reason to look at so many cases is that there is noise in the system – looking at individual case studies may mask overall statistical trends that can only be picked up with a large dataset.o They build upon work by ecologists that created the large database used.o They use the same definition of collapse o A fishery is collapsed in year t if the harvest in year t is <10% of the maximum recorded harvest up to year to A better definition would be based on the stock not on the catch, but we do not have good stock information to useo Out of that database, they identify 121 fisheries that have ITQ systems.o Demonstrating statistically a causal linkage between rights-based management and fisheries sustainability is complicated by three competing effects. The number of ITQ fisheries is growing, and new ITQ fisheries are drawn from a global pool with an ever-increasing fraction of collapsed fisheries (time bias) The conversion of fisheries to ITQs may involve a biased selection There may be temporal benefits of an ITQo To account for potential selection bias, they use a variety of estimation strategieso They find that, by 2003, the fraction of ITQ-managed fisheries that were collapsed was about half that of non-ITQ fisheries. o This result probably underestimates ITQ benefits, because most ITQ fisheries are young.o ITQs are a blunt economic instrument and may actually create perverse incentives such as “high-grading”o Partial rights allocation (where fish cross jurisdictional boundaries) can result in both misreporting and failure to control catches o In multispecies fisheries, restrictions on quota species can lead to targeting and overfishing on commercial species not in the quota system. o Placing all species in the quota system leads to very expensive fishery management systemso Rights allocation tends to be an irreversible decision short of complete government buyout of a fishery. o Like other management regimes based on strong property rights, ITQ management can lead to litigious behavior and attract speculators.o Note that Costello’s discussion is predicated upon the fishermen having the property rights…o …a rather radical suggestion is to assign property rights to the public at large and have the fishermen bid to have access to the fishery.o This is how we do it for timber on public lands.o However, the existence of past property claims would be an impediment to this strategy.- Garcia and Grainero Jackson looked at the past, this paper looks at the future.o It does so using scenarios. The use of scenarios is prevalent in the climate change literature because – as in this case – there are a lot of moving parts and it is hard to assign probabilities to future developments. The main reason is that there is a lot of uncertainty on how policies will look like and how people will behave.o “Longer-term climate change will affect the ocean environment and its capacity to sustain fishery stocks and is likely to exacerbate the stresses on marine fish stocks, from fishing and other marine or land-based activities.o The extent to which it will affect fisheries, in the different regions and species, is however not yet clear. o Productivity might increase or decrease significantly.o Ecosystem boundaries may be displaced and species composition may change remarkably.”o “ Widespread agreement that, given  The officially declared marine fisheries landings with all their shortcomings (ca. 80–90 mt),  The estimated discards (presently less than 10 mt), The amount likely to be presently caught by IUU fishing  The impossibility of optimizing the production of all species simultaneously, o