Costs of monitoring ocean fisheriesI have a related question, that arose in my lecture. How are fishery quotas actually enforced? Who is measuring the fish catch? Are these numbers at all accurate? ----- Original Message ----- From: Charles Chester To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 3:52 PM Subject: [gep-ed] Costs of monitoring ocean fisheries
Hi everyone, Please excuse the potential naïveté of this question, but I'm trying to find out if anyone's estimated the total costs of what it would take to effectively monitor global fisheries. Not looking for enforcement estimates, but just what it would cost (1) to improve current extraction estimates and (2) to get a good handle on the actual extent of IUU (illegal, unregulated & underreported) fisheries. In essence, what would it cost to make a fisheries biologist happy? (Don't think about that question for too long....) I blandly told my class today that if we can analogize IUU to a "Darth Vader" form of "monitoring," and if we accept the estimated monetary value of IUU of ~10b (a very sketchy figure), then we might be able to use the costs of IUU (nets, crew, boat maintenance, wifi access, lattes, etc.) as a proxy measure for what it would cost to monitor global fisheries (and assuming a profit, those costs have to be <~$10b). Though I immediately turned to another subject in the hopes that nobody wrote that spurious idea down in their notes, I am still wondering if anyone's made the estimates of the actual costs of effective global monitoring. My current guess is that it would far exceed the value of IUU, but it's only a guess (kind of depends on the extent of IUU-in a perverse sort of way, one would hope that it would far exceed the value of IUU). Please send ideas to me, I'll collate, and then send back out to the list. Thanks, -Charlie ________________ Charles C. Chester 9 Lowell Street Cambridge, MA 02138 617.304.9373 http://www.Y2Y.net http://www.brandeis.edu/environmentalstudies http://www.ConservationClimateChangeClearinghouse.net
