0000000000671316
AUTHOR
U. Rashid Sumaila
No fear of bankruptcy: the innate self-subsidizing forces in recreational fishing
Abstract Recreational fishing, by both local residents and tourists, is a popular activity globally. The behaviour and motivation of recreational fishers is different from those of commercial fishers. Unlike the latter, the former are not dependent on making profits to continue fishing. Rather, the value of recreational fishing to those who engage in it is a combination of catches and experience values. The latter value implies that recreational fishers might continue fishing when they should not, analogous to the effect of subsidy in the commercial fishing sector. Hence, the term “self-subsidizing”: a fishery as one in which fishers subsidize themselves through an economic investment in ge…
Towards a sustainable and equitable blue economy
The global rush to develop the ‘blue economy’ risks harming both the marine environment and human wellbeing. Bold policies and actions are urgently needed. We identify five priorities to chart a course towards an environmentally sustainable and socially equitable blue economy.
Searching for a compromise between biological and economic demands to protect vulnerable habitats
AbstractIdentifying vulnerable habitats is necessary to designing and prioritizing efficient marine protected areas (MPAs) to sustain the renewal of living marine resources. However, vulnerable habitats rarely become MPAs due to conflicting interests such as fishing. We propose a spatial framework to help researchers and managers determine optimal conservation areas in a multi-species fishery, while also considering the economic relevance these species may have in a given society, even in data poor situations. We first set different ecological criteria (i.e. species resilience, vulnerability and trophic level) to identify optimal areas for conservation and restoration efforts, which was bas…