Josh Eagle

Fugitive Salmon: Assessing the Risks of Escaped Fish from Net-Pen Aquaculture

Abstract The farming of salmon and other marine finfish in open net pens continues to increase along the worlds coastlines as the aquaculture industry expands to meet human demand. Farm fish are known to escape from pens in all salmon aquaculture areas. Their escape into the wild can result in interbreeding and competition with wild salmon and can facilitate the spread of pathogens, thereby placing more pressure on already dwindling wild populations. Here we assess the ecological, genetic, and socioeconomic impacts of farm salmon escapes, using a risk-assessment framework. We show that risks of damage to wild salmon populations, ecosystems, and society are large when salmon are farmed in their native range, when large numbers of salmon are farmed relative to the size of wild populations, and when exotic pathogens are introduced. We then evaluate the policy and management options for reducing risks and discuss the implications for farming other types of marine finfish.

Salmon Aquaculture in the Pacific Northwest A Global Industry with Local Impacts

Abstract From the docks of declining coastal villages to the desks of corporate and government offices, salmon farming has been hailed as a new hope for the worlds ailing offshore fishing industry and a way to reduce pressure on severely depleted fish stocks. However, the aquaculture industry has grown so quickly that, in many areas-including the Pacific Northwest-it has outstripped the wherewithal to address its adverse ecological impacts. Will fish farms, in the end, do more harm than good? Or can they deliver on their sustainable promise?

Is a new mandate needed for marine ecosystem-based management?

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org Humans are intimately linked to the ecosystems in which they live through ecosystem services. Coastal and marine ecosystems, in particular, provide critical services, such as storm protection, pollution mitigation, and food, as well as opportunities for research, education, recreation, and preservation of natural and cultural heritage. Yet human activities now impact almost every aspect of coastal and marine ecosystems and threaten the continued production of valued services (UNEP 2006). These impacts are increasing in extent and intensity, and are predicted to continue to do so, unless dramatic changes in policy occur (MA 2005). Historically, human activities and impacts on coastal and marine environments have been managed in a piecemeal manner. For example, in the US, dredging of coastal areas is overseen by the US Army Corps of Engineers, while commercial fishing is regulated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries and a host of state agencies, depending on exactly where the activity occurs. In total, more than 15 federal agencies and departments are involved in managing ocean resources in the US. Considerable evidence indicates that this fragmented approach has not adequately sustained coastal and ocean resources (POC 2003; USCOP 2004). Recently, therefore, there has been increasing interest in the US and around the world in moving toward more ecosystembased approaches to coastal and ocean management (WSSD 2002; POC 2003; USCOP 2004; UNEP 2006). Ecosystem-based management (EBM) is an integrated approach that considers the entire ecosystem, including humans (POC 2003; USCOP 2004; McLeod et al. 2005). Marine EBM goes beyond traditional marine management approaches, which usually focus on only a single species or sector, by incorporating the interactions among ecosystem components and cumulative impacts of multiple activities into management decisions. Approaches to implementing marine EBM vary, but share a focus on protecting the structure, functioning, and key processes of coastal and marine ecosystems, so as to sustain the services that humans want and need (McLeod et al. 2005). This broad objective and the inclusion of humans as inteTWO VIEWS TWO VIEWS TWO VIEWS

The role of discounting and dynamics in determining the economic efficiency of time-area closures for managing fishery bycatch

Time-area closures are commonly used to manage fisheries bycatch and involve temporarily closing an area of the ocean to particular fishing gears. We examine conditions in which implementing a time-area closure would increase the economic value of fisheries, focusing on a case study application in the Gulf of Mexico. Pelagic longline fishermen catch the highly valued Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus, Scombridae) on their Gulf of Mexico spawning grounds while fishing for Atlantic yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares). We analyze a multispecies, multifishery bioeconomic model that includes information on migratory patterns from electronic tagged bluefin tuna. We use dynamic optimization to identify management strategies that would maximize the net present value of tuna fisheries, allowing for discounting of future benefits and costs relative to the present. If past fishing mortality rates continue in Atlantic bluefin tuna fisheries, implementing a time-area closure in the Gulf of Mexico incurs economic costs. However, the net present value of the fisheries is increased by implementing a time-area closure as part of a broader commitment to rebuild the heavily depleted bluefin population, provided the discount rate and the costs of such a closure in forgone fishing opportunities are not too large. The increase in economic value offered by a time-area closure is small relative to the overall economic value of rebuilding itself and it may be economically optimal only to implement a closure once sufficient rebuilding has already taken place.

When Does Legal Flexibility Work in Environmental Law

Environmental law scholars, practitioners, and policymakers have wrestled for some time with the implications of climate change for environmental law. There is widespread, although not universal, agreement that climate change requires greater flexibility in environmental legal systems. Flexibility — reduced procedural requirements for administrative agency decision making and less rigid substantive standards — would allow the agencies that implement environmental law to adapt to a future world characterized by dynamic, uncertain changes in natural resource systems. According to its proponents, flexibility would make it easier for agencies to more frequently update their management or regulatory decisions to respond to changed conditions, and also to facilitate adaptive management. However, there has been little exploration of the conditions under which flexibility improves or undermines the effectiveness of environmental law.This Article examines two areas of environmental law that have historically had a great deal of flexibility: hunting law and marine fisheries law. In both areas, management and regulatory decisions are updated on a regular basis by the relevant agencies, often annually. Procedural requirements for making decisions are often streamlined. And the substantive standards that apply to agency decisions are often quite broad and flexible, leaving substantial discretion to the agency. Yet these two areas of environmental law have experienced very different outcomes in terms of implementation: fisheries management in the United States is often perceived as failing, while hunting law is seen as quite successful in achieving its goals.This Article concludes that these different outcomes are the result of the interaction of legal flexibility with two other factors: the level of uncertainty about the condition or status of the natural resource being managed and the political context for regulatory or management decisions. Fisheries management is characterized by much greater levels of uncertainty about population levels than hunting management. Moreover, fisheries are the one area in the U.S. economy where there is still a substantial commercial industry based on the capture of wildlife for human use. The combination of scientific uncertainty and flexible law creates a substantial discretionary space in which decision makers can operate. In other words, decision makers have a wide range of legally defensible management choices. The fishing industry is able to exploit this fact to argue for weaker, but still legally defensible, regulation. The industry has every incentive to organize in pursuit of this goal. In contrast,commercial hunting was eliminated in the United States in the nineteenth century. Thus, there are no major interest groups with a stake in increasing hunting quotas, and therefore there is no substantial effort to manipulate a flexible legal system to weaken regulatory standards. Whether flexibility will be successful in a regulatory or management system will depend in part on the scientific and political context for the resource being protected or managed. Flexibility is not a panacea that can be applied uniformly throughout environmental law.

A Window into the Regulated Commons: The Takings Clause, Investment Security, and Sustainability

The holding of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in American Pelagic Fishing Co. v. United States points to the conclusion that the government will almost never be liable, under the Takings Clause, when fisheries regulations reduce the value of commercial fishing permits, vessels, or gear. From the perspective of natural resource economics, this is a healthy result. Economists suggest that solving commons problems requires that natural resources be under the complete control of a sole owner who makes self-interested decisions about resource use, and if the Fifth Amendment required the government owner to compensate fishermen when it tightened regulations, it would hamper the governments ability to regulate optimally. One problem with the economic theory of commons solution, however, is that it does not distinguish between sole private ownership and sole government ownership in terms of their application. In this Article, I argue that government ownership is fraught with problems that do not occur in the private ownership context. To the extent that government resource owners rely on entrepreneurs to capture and sell natural resources, the government must play two roles: regulator and facilitator. These roles frequently come into conflict, inevitably compromising the effectiveness of regulation. Furthermore, entrepreneurs have incentives to lobby against long-term conservation. The poor condition of United States fisheries is proof that these two problems - governments dual role and fishermens lobbying - are preventing the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act from achieving its goal of sustainable fisheries. Until the Act is changed to reduce both fishermens incentive to lobby against conservation and the likelihood that regulators will accede to their demands, it will probably not succeed.