Preemptive Overfishing

The Endangered Species Act endangered some species and announcing that a fishing area will be protected in the future increases fishing now.

PNAS: Most large-scale conservation policies are anticipated or announced in advance. This risks the possibility of preemptive resource extraction before the conservation intervention goes into force. We use a high-resolution dataset of satellite-based fishing activity to show that anticipation of an impending no-take marine reserve undermines the policy by triggering an unintended race-to-fish. We study one of the world’s largest marine reserves, the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), and find that fishers more than doubled their fishing effort once this area was earmarked for eventual protected status. The additional fishing effort resulted in an impoverished starting point for PIPA equivalent to 1.5 y of banned fishing. Extrapolating this behavior globally, we estimate that if other marine reserve announcements were to trigger similar preemptive fishing, this could temporarily increase the share of overextracted fisheries from 65% to 72%. Our findings have implications for general conservation efforts as well as the methods that scientists use to monitor and evaluate policy efficacy.

One puzzle is why there should be an increase in over-fishing? Shouldn’t a commons already be overfished to the point of zero return? One possibility is that previous steps to limit overfishing were working.

The possibility of preemptive overfishing suggests the utility of surprise protections, but that’s not always possible and the authors don’t suggest that preemptive overfishing makes protection unwise only that it has a short term cost.

Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky.