Eric M. Thunberg

A model of fishing vessel accident probability

PROBLEM Commercial fishing is one of the least safe occupations. METHOD The researchers develop a fishing vessel accident probability model for fishing areas off the northeastern United States using logit regression and daily data from 1981 to 1993. RESULTS The results indicate that fishing vessel accident probability declined over the study period. Higher wind speed is associated with greater accident probability. Medium-size vessels have the highest accident probability, while small vessels have the lowest. Within the study region, accident probability is lower in the southwestern section than in the northeastern section. Accidents are likely to occur closer to shore than offshore. Accident probability is lowest in spring. IMPACT ON INDUSTRY The probability model is an important building block in development and quantitative assessment of management mechanisms related to safety in the commercial fishing industry.

3 – A Framework for Monitoring and Assessing Socioeconomics and Governance of Large Marine Ecosystems1

This chapter has described a framework for assessing and monitoring the salient socioeconomic and governance elements of LMEs. The assessment and monitoring framework consists of 12 steps that, if applied, are expected to produce the essential information required for adaptive ecosystem management. The ecosystem paradigm is emerging as the dominant approach to managing natural resources in the U.S., as well as internationally. The shift away from the management of individual resources to the broader perspective of ecosystems has not been confined to academia and think tanks where it first began; it also is beginning to take root in government policy and programs. Many have advocated a new, broader approach to managing the nations natural resources. The approach recognizes that plant and animal communities are interdependent and interact with their physical environment to form distinct ecological units called ecosystems. The approach also recognizes that many human actions and their consequences, including marine pollution, extend across jurisdictional boundaries. This chapter presents a methodology for determining what is known of the socioeconomic and governance aspects—the human dimensions—of LME management. The chapter describes a basic framework for identifying the salient socioeconomic and governance elements and processes of an LME. Methods for monitoring and assessing the various elements and processes are also discussed in the chapter. There is description on the human dimensions of LMES, monitoring and assessment, applications of the monitoring and assessment framework, property rights entitlements and regimes for LME management, the structure of property rights entitlements in an LME, property rights regimes and management of LME resources. Property rights paradigm could be the framework necessary to design LME resource management policies for long-term economic growth and resource sustainability. Property rights establish the incentives and time-horizons for resource use and investment.

Economic Analysis of Technical Interdependencies and the Value of Effort in a Multi-Species Fishery

The paper reports the results of an analysis of the economic interrelationships in Floridas commercial near-shore fishery. A dual-based revenue function is specified to estimate own-price and cross-price elasticities of supply for selected key species and to estimate the marginal value of effort. Empirical findings indicate the fishery is characterized by joint production among all species pairs and that the complementarity of production is strongest for mullet as compared to any other species. This finding implies that effective management of the near-shore species complement may be possible through management measures designed to reduce the harvest of mullet. The paper concludes by demonstrating the potential effect that restricting harvest on mullet might have on landings of other near-shore species. The amount of compensation payments required to leave commercial harvesters as well off with the management change as without it are also presented.

Economic Activity Associated with the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem: Application of an Input-Output Approach

Abstract The industries linked to the uses of a large marine ecosystem (LME) have a substantial influence on contiguous coastal economies. We estimate the economic activity of U.S. marine sectors associated with the Northeast Shelf LME. Our best upper bound estimate of total output impact is

The Relationship of Fish Harvesting Capacity to Excess Capacity and Overcapacity

339 billion, including a total “value-added” impact of

The Benefits of Rationalization: The Case of the American Lobster Fishery

209 billion. Total employment impacts are estimated on the order of 3.6 million persons. The estimate of total value-added impact is approximately 10% of the

An Age-Structured Bioeconomic Simulation of U.S. Silver Hake Fisheries

2.2 trillion total gross state product for the region. In the future, critical interactions between industrial sectors and the ecological health of the Northeast Shelf will affect economic activity in opposing ways.

Testing the Stability of Recreational Fishing Participation Probabilities

To clarify the concepts of excess and overcapacity, we discuss capacity at its simplest level and stress the importance of financial incentives for fishermen in developing fishery management regulations to eliminate or reduce overcapacity. Why overcapacity—not excess capacity or capacity itself—is of importance to fishery managers is explained in terms of living marine resources that are treated as open-access fisheries. As a result, the amount of fish that could be caught by a fisherman at a target stock abundance level greatly exceeds what is actually caught at a given stock size; i.e., overcapacity. While intended to provide a basic understanding of capacity concepts, this note does not present all aspects of the capacity management problem in these highly diverse domestic fisheries.

An Analysis of the Relationship between Fish Harvesting and Processing Sectors in New England

The American lobster (Homarus americanus) fishery is currently the most valuable fishery on the Atlantic coasts of both the USA and Canada based on ex-vessel value. Lobster conservation policies have traditionally focused on technical restrictions such as minimum size requirements, v-notching, and a prohibition on taking egg-bearing females to protect the resource, rather than direct controls on fishing effort or catch. However, in 2005 the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission adopted a plan for the southern New England lobster management area (Area 2) that establishes a structure for limiting the number of license holders and the number of traps each lobsterman can have in the water. In this article, a bio-economic modeling exercise is employed to examine the biological and economic impacts of reductions to the level of fishing effort in a fishery that is modeled to represent the full-time lobster fishing fleet in Area 2. Model results show that a reduction in fishing effort has the potential to: (i) improve the sustainability characteristics of the lobster resource and, in contrast to popular belief, (ii) actually stimulate economic growth in the coastal economy.

Total Factor Productivity Change in the New England Groundfish Fishery: 1964-1993

Abstract We present a bioeconomic simulation of the U.S. fisheries for silver hake Merluccius bilinearis, an abundant species distributed over the northwest Atlantic continental shelf and historically important to both U.S. and foreign fishing fleets. The model combines elements of agestructured population and harvest yield models with a two-equation price response model. The analysis evaluates biological benefits of interest to managers, such as future yields or rebuilding of parental stock, as well as future revenues and net present value of interest to harvesters. In one set of simulations, yield and revenue response surfaces were generated for varying levels of fishing mortality (F) and selection at age under constant annual recruitment. In another, a stochastic stock–recruitment function permitted assessment of yield and revenue trajectories over time given variable annual recruitment. Under equilibrium conditions, response surfaces for both total fishery yield and revenue are asymptotic with increas...