Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The management of fisheries has progressed over the past century in an attempt to solve the problem of open access. A range of controls, both economic and non-economic in nature, have been used to ration the use of marine resources. Unfortunately, many controls have failed to correct open access problems. Whilst a recent development in fishery control, protected areas defined as an area with a fishery free of extractive pressure, have been put forward as an arrangement which may, in conjunction with other controls, be used to overcome the over-exploitation of marine resources. Marine protected areas have been advocated in areas where other forms of fishery management are impractical or unsuccessful (Sumaila 1998). Arguments for protected area use are based around the heterogeneous nature of fisheries, uncertainties in marine populations and as a hedge strategy to reduce risks of over-exploitation (Conrad 1999a). Through the protection of biodiversity, improving the resilience of the ecosystem, protected areas may mitigate the effects of negative shocks (Ludwig et al. 1993 and Bostford et al. 1997). Further, protected areas have been suggested as a means to manage uncertainty and environmental stochasticity (Grafton and Kompas 2005 and Grafton et al. 2005). The protection of biomass and habitat has the potential to improve fishery returns even when stocks are not overly exploited, with the benefits accruing even from small-sized protected areas (Grafton et al. 2005). The use of marine protected areas as a management tool has resulted from a recognition that it is important to preserve biological habitats as well as stocks. From a societal point of view, the use of protected areas should be evaluated in the context of changes in resource rent and improvements in welfare. As fishery resources are often owned by a common group, usually society, management objectives should be to maximise the return from use of the resources, whether for extractive or non-extractive purposes. Given this decision criterion, protected areas can be evaluated in the sense of opportunity costs and benefits. Protected areas will influence the return from fishery resources through changes in access to fishing grounds, and thus harvest, effort and resource rent. Once a protected area is established, the flow of biomass from the protected area to the remaining fishing ground, may increase biomass, influence the effects of uncertainty and stochasticity, thus effecting mean harvests, effort and resource rent may increase. Changes in resource rent are dependent on other controls. Protected areas are a ‘blunt’ policy instrument, in the sense that they are not an instrument to capture resource rent or change the incentives of fishers. Models of marine protected areas in fisheries vary in complexity, however, a few key elements are necessary in analysing the effects of protected area creation. First, multi-species interactions have the potential to be significant in determining the outcome from a protected area; second, effort expended in the fishery must be dynamic, that is, it must be endogenously determined by the model as fishers will respond to changes in rent brought about through the establishment of a protected area; third, institutional structures that govern the expenditure of effort within a fishery will play an important role in the effectiveness of protected areas in increasing the resource rent of a fishery; and fourth, environmental stochasticity and uncertainty need to be included in the analysis. A stochastic and deterministic model of a predator-prey meta-population fishery was developed to analyse the effects of protected area creation within a fishery. Such a model has not previously been used to analyse protected area creation. The model was analytically solved to find the optimal biomass of each species in an individual patch. This allowed for a comparison of protected areas under a range of management controls ranging from those which led to open access fishing to those which led to an optimal steady-state biomass. The model allowed for linkages between sub-populations based on differing density related flows. Further, due to the linkages between species on both environmental and economic grounds, the effect of protected areas on different groups which target different species could be analysed. The benefits from protected area creation were classified into unique and non-unique benefits. Unique benefits were defined as those which solely flow from the use of a protected area as a tool in fisheries management. Two unique benefits were defined: • Improvements in the resilience of the fishery; and • Reductions in environmental stochasticity. The ability of a protected area to both improve the resilience of the fishery, and smooth fluctuations in environmental stochasticity have been shown to lead to increases in mean resource rent. Thus, protected areas were shown to form part of an optimal fisheries management structure. Generally, the resilience benefits were maximised for small-sized protected areas, whereas the reduced environmental stochasticity benefits were maximised for larger protected areas. The dispersal system between the protected area and the fishing ground affected the unique benefits from protected area creation. Sink-source dispersal increased the unique benefits from protected area creation, as stock movements occurred independently of relative population densities. The independent flow improved the ability of the protected area to hasten the return of the fishery to a steady-state and lessened the variation of harvests in the open fishing grounds. However, in the case where the protected area led to large differences in population densities, and if the area formed a sub-population that was linked to the surrounding fishing ground by density-dependent dispersal, the unique benefits are likely to be greater than under sink-source dispersal. The non-unique benefits were defined as those which could be obtained from other control mechanisms. These benefits were non-unique as they could be achieved from more stringent controls on fisher behaviour. The determinants of the non-unique benefit in terms of dispersal were the same as for the unique benefits. However, the economic conditions of the fishery determined the magnitude of the non-unique benefits. For fisheries with sub-optimal biomass, the unique benefits were greater than those with optimal steady-state biomass. The non-unique benefits identified from protected area creation were: • Changes in biomass towards optimal levels; • Changes in species biomass ratios towards optimal levels; and • Changes in effort towards optimal levels. Protected areas in fisheries may be an optimal policy choice to achieve the non-unique benefits of protected area creation. Protected areas, it has been argued, are a relatively low cost management tool, due to the lower monitoring and enforcement costs. Thus, the use of protected areas offer a solution to the problems of over extraction of fishery resources for lower transaction costs, which may erode the non-unique benefits under different policy instruments. If this is the case, then a protected area larger than is required to maximise the unique benefits of protected area creation could form part of an optimal fisheries management strategy. Whether the protected area is larger or smaller than the size that maximises both the unique and non-unique benefits of protected area creation would depend on the level of transaction costs involved in using alternative policy instruments. Protected areas were found to have distributional effects on the fishery due to changes in the species biomass ratio towards the predator species post protected area creation. The creation of a protected area will have distributional effects on the fishing industry if different fisheries target the different species separately. Fishers targeting predator species are likely to gain from the establishment of a protected area, as now the aggregate level of stocks of this species is greater, leading to both greater unique and non-unique benefits. For fisheries that target prey species, the benefits of protected area creation are lessened. The increased predation within protected area boundaries limited the unique benefits of the protected area. The low cost nature of a protected area will influence the portion of the fishery used for this type of control given an optimal policy programme. If protected areas are relatively low cost in comparison with other controls they should be used relatively more intensely. Further, the use of protected areas may hasten the evolution of fisheries away from open access exploitation towards controls which maximise the value of the fishery. With lower transaction costs, the ability to adopt protected areas over other forms of management is greater, and by doing so, the movement towards optimal exploitation will improve the discounted value of the fishery. The analysis presented in this thesis examined the benefits of protected areas to fisheries. The focus of the study was placed on the benefits to flow to a fishery if a protected area was used as a tool for wild-harvest fisheries management. Marine protected areas also have the potential to generate a range of other benefits, such as recreational values, non-use values, and potential improvements in consumer surplus from fish caught within fisheries that use protected areas. These other benefits would need to be considered when determining whether or not a protected area should be created in a fishery.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216177 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Greenville, Jared William |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | The author retains copyright of this thesis., http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/copyright.html |
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