The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development

The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development

Volume 1, Issue 2
Spring 2008

Co-Editors
Julian Morris, International Policy Network and University of Buckingham Dr. Indur M. Goklany, Interior Departments Office of Policy Analysis

Book Reviews Editor

Pierre Desrochers, University of Toronto

Managing Editor
Caroline Boin, International Policy Network

Editorial Board
Professor Terry Anderson, Hoover Institution (Stanford) Professor Wilfred Beckerman, Oxford University Professor Ian Castles, Australian National University Mr. Michael De Alessi, Reason Foundation Professor Bibek Debroy, International Management Institute, Delhi Professor Pierre Desrochers, University of Toronto Professor Xingyuan Feng, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Professor Eugenio Figueroa, University of Chile Professor Cay Folkers, University of Bochum Professor Tom de Gregori, University of Houston Professor Hannes Gissurarson, University of Iceland Professor Wolfgang Kaspar, University of New South Wales Professor Martin Krause, ESEADE, Buenos Aires Professor Hansjrg Kster, University of Hanover Professor Andrew Morriss, University of Illinois Sir Alan Peacock, David Hume Institute Dr. Benny Peiser, Liverpool John Moores University Professor C. S. Prakash, Tuskegee University Professor Paul Reiter, Pasteur Institute Professor Colin Robinson, University of Surrey Professor Charles T. Rubin, Duquesne University Professor Mark Sagoff, University of Maryland Professor Douglas Southgate, Ohio State University Professor David Schmidtz, University of Arizona Professor David S. Schoenbrod, New York Law School and Cato Institute Professor Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago Professor Anthony Trewavas, University of Edinburgh Professor Dr. Erich Weede, University of Bonn Professor Wang Xingbo, Capital University of Business and Economics Professor Bruce Yandle, Clemson University

The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development ISSN Online 1753-3104 Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development Published by International Policy Press Unless otherwise stated, the opinions stated by the authors of articles, editorials, letters and book reviews are those of their authors, and do not represent the views of the Publisher. This journal is only available online, free of charge at www.ejsd.org Rights Information All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise except as described below without the permission in writing of the Publisher. Copying of articles in not permitted except for personal and internal use, to the extent permitted by national copyright law, or under the terms of a licence issued by the national Reproduction Rights Organisation (such as the Copyright Licensing Agency or Copyright Clearance Agency). Requests for permission for other kinds of copying such as for general distribution, for advertising or promotional purposes, for creating new collective works, or for resale, and other enquirie, should be addressed to: editor =a= ejsd.org (replace =a= with @) Submission of Manuscripts The Editors welcome submissions for the Journal. Authors should send their proposed articles as a word attachment by email to the editors at editor =a= ejsd.org (replace =a= with @).

CONTENTS
Editorial
1 When it comes to the Sustainability of Marine Resources, Institutions Matter Julian Morris

Articles
3 Measuring the biological sustainability of marine fisheries: property rights, politics, and science Michael De Alessi 13 Sustainability of Fisheries Rgnvaldur Hannesson 23 The historical development of fisheries in New Zealand with respect to sustainable development principles Mark T. Gibbs 35 Icelands ITQ system creates new wealth Ragnar Arnason

Book Reviews
43 Review of Climate change, justice and future generations By Edward A. Page Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, England, 2006 Review by Wilfred Beckerman 45 Review of The Bottom Billion By Paul Collier Oxford University Press, USA, 2007 Review by Karol Boudreaux 47 Review of Democratizing technology: risk, responsibility & the regulation of chemicals By Anne Chapman Earthscan, London, England, 2007 Review by Bill Durodi 49 Review of Science and certainty By John T.O. Kirk CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Australia, 2007 Review by Terence Kealey

51 Review of The global environment and world politics, 2nd ed. By Elizabeth DeSombre Continuum, London, England/New York, NY, 2007 Review by Jeremy Rabkin 55 Review of Blessed unrest: how the largest movement in the world came into being and why no one saw it coming By Paul Hawken Viking, New York, NY, 2007 Review by James M. Sheehan 59 Review of The world without us By Alan Weisman Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martins Press, New York, NY, 2007 Review by Philip Stott

Note
61 On the Limits to Knowledge of Future Marine Biodiversity Jesse H. Ausubel

The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (2008) 1(2)

When it comes to the Sustainability of Marine Resources, Institutions Matter

Julian Morris*
*Julian Morris is the Executive Director of International Policy Network and a Visiting Professor at the University of Buckingham. Email: editor =a= ejsd.org (replace =a= with @)

Humanity has had a substantial impact on marine resources, especially in the past two hundred years. In the nineteenth century, increased demand for oil (for lighting and lubrication) led to a dramatic expansion of whaling fleets around the world. Competition drove the development of more effective whaling technologies. Under normal circumstances such improvements would bring social benefits. But because the whales were for the most part in an open access commons, whalers were competing to capture the same whales, so the increase in the whaling fleet and increased expenditure on technology led to rising levels of waste, declining total factor productivity and a decline in the number of whales (Davis et al., 1997). Had it not been for the development of substitutes, especially mineral oil, the plight of the whales might have been even worse. During the twentieth century, fish stocks, which were once seen as inexhaustible, began to suffer the same fate as the whales. Indeed, as De Alessi (this issue) observes The issue is not whether depletion [of fish stocks] is a widespread problem, but just how bad things have become, and what might be done to fix the problem. To the latter, De Alessi points out that It is now well established that most fishers who depleted resources were simply responding rationally to the rules of the game presented to them. Yet as Hannesson (this issue) notes, it is 97 years since the publication of Jens Warmings Om Grudrente av Fiskegrunte (on Rent of Fishing Grounds) and 54 years since the publication of H. Scott Gordons The economic theory of a common property resource: the fishery. These and the many subsequent papers they inspired show that, in the absence of appropriate rules of the game, or institutions as economists call them, there is a tendency for fishers to over-invest in gear and thereby to dissipate the rents that otherwise would be available from fishing. In other words, although we have known for a very long time that the institutions

governing use of marine resources are in most cases inadequate, if not counterproductive, the shift towards better institutional structures has been slow. Why might this be? Gary Libecap (1989) analysed various historical examples of changes in institutional structure, from which he derived the following list of factors that affect the intensity of political conflict over distribution issues and the likelihood of agreement on institutional change at any particular time. These included: The size of the aggregate expected gains from institutional change. The number and heterogeneity of the bargaining parties. Information problems. And The skewness or concentration of the current and proposed share distribution. Most likely all these factors have to a greater or lesser extent affected whether or not nations shifted to superior institutions for the management of marine resources. It is noteworthy that the two countries which have arguably most dramatically improved the institutions governing their fisheries, Iceland and New Zealand, also derive a relatively large proportion of national income from fisheries. This suggests that it may not be just the absolute size of the expected gains from institutional change that matters, but also the size of those gains relative to other political changes. Michael De Alessi (this issue) offers a complementary explanation for the failure to adopt better institutions: the lack of acceptance by many of those with influence, especially in the realms of fisheries science, of the important role played by the institutions governing marine resources, combined with a bias on the part of government officials in favour of scientific management of fisheries. While some nations seem to have adopted better institutional structures for managing marine resources than have others, none can be said to be perfectly sustainable. Part of the problem is that because of inadequate data and imperfect models it is difficult to define

Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development

welcome to the ejsd

even what a biologically sustainable fishery would look like (De Alessi, this issue). The acquisition of better data is clearly a high priority (Ausubel, this issue). But what data one seeks to acquire and whether one has the incentive to acquire that data in reliable ways will likely be significantly affected by ones goals and the resources available and hence by the structure of the institutions governing the marine resources. Rgnvaldur Hannesson (this issue) compares and contrasts several instances of fisheries collapse and shows that both exogenous factors (such as El Nio/La Nia) and the way in which the fishery is governed are important. One important lesson is that fisheries that allow more adaptive management tend to suffer less in response to exogenous changes; and fisheries that do collapse as a result of such exogenous changes rebound far more quickly. In part this may be because the data upon which decisions are based are less subject to political manipulation. Likely more important is the degree to which decision-making is carried out by individuals with a strong interest in conserving the fishery. A plausible explanation as to why the majority of fisheries in Iceland and New Zealand have not collapsed is that boat owners now have very strong incentives to ensure that total catch levels are kept low enough to ensure the continued health of the fishery into the future. These incentives come from the fact that they own quota, which represents a share of the total catch, and these quota are tradable; as a result, the value of the quota is dependant on the value of future catches (Gibbs, this issue; Arnason, this issue; De Alessi, this issue; Hannesson, this issue). By contrast, in the EU, Canada and many other places where major fisheries have collapsed, boat owners do not have the same incentives because they have no guarantee that their share of the catch will remain the same in the future: so, perversely, each boat owner has an incentive to demand catches be as high as possible each year, regardless of the impact on future catch levels. While tradable share quota systems have done much to improve management of fisheries in many places, they remain far from perfect. Mark Gibbs (this issue) highlights both the benefits and some of the problems with the existing quota system in New Zealand and more generally. In particular, he emphasises the problems that can result from the fact that quota apply to individual species and so do not necessarily represent an ideal way to manage ecosystems. He also raises the possibility that if the rights created by the establishment of the quota system inhibit the development of superior rights systems for example the establishment of clearly
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defined property rights in the ocean itself then they might ultimately be seen as counterproductive. Ragnar Arnason (this issue) shows that when individuals are allowed to own the rights to a share of the total allowable catch, not only do they have greater incentives to conserve those fish, but their shares can act as collateral for other investments, leading to a virtuous circle of economic development. That this happens in the context of land and other forms of real property has been long established (e.g. de Soto, 2000) but it is of great interest that it appears also to be true for share quota in fisheries. The several contributions to this issue provide important insights into what might lead to greater sustainability of marine resources. The conclusion? Institutions matter as do the incentives for institutional change.

References
Davis, L. E., Gallman, R. E. and K. Gleiter. 1997. In Pursuit of Leviathan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. De Soto, H. 2000. The Mystery of Capital. London: Bantam Press Gordon, H. S. 1954. The economic theory of a common property resource: the fishery. Journal of Political Economy 62: 12442. Libecap, G. 1989. Contracting for Property Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warming, J. 1911. Om Grundrente av Fiskgrunde. Nationalaokonomisk Tidskrift 499505.

Acknowledgements
We are grateful to all the contributors to this issue. We would also like to welcome Caroline Boin on board as the new Managing Editor of the EJSD and thank her for steering this issue through. And we would like to welcome Pierre Desrochers as the new Book Reviews editor. Julian and Indur

The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (2008) 1(2)

Measuring the biological sustainability of marine fisheries: property rights, politics, and science
Michael De Alessi*
* Michael De Alessi, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley, and a Senior Fellow at the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles. Email: dealessi=a=ix.netcom.com (replace =a= with @)

While nearly everyone favors sustainability, few agree on what the term actually means. In the case of marine fisheries, what first appears simple exploiting species at a level that does not diminish their productivity in the future is confounded by the possible inclusion of social, cultural, and economic notions of sustainability, as well as the effects of fishing practices on the wider ecology (that is, on both non-target species and habitats) of the seas. These approaches are all important, but this paper will focus on measuring the biological sustainability of targeted species, which must precede (but certainly not preclude) all other measures of sustainability. While determining what is sustainable is tricky, it is not difficult to find examples of biologically unsustainable fisheries. From the dramatic collapse of the once prolific cod fisheries of New England and Eastern Canada to the decline of subsistence fisheries throughout the developing world, marine fisheries are a classic case where the sustainable development of a resource has been the exception rather than the rule. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO 2007), worldwide marine fish catches have declined over the last ten years and most marine capture fisheries are now either depleted or hovering at the brink of overexploitation. In the United States, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS 2002) reports that almost onethird of U.S. fish stocks are overfished, or that 75% of U.S. commercial fish stocks are either overexploited or fully exploited. Some academics have suggested that the problem is even worse, estimating in the journal Science that since the advent of industrial fishing more than 90% of large predatory fish have been removed from the worlds oceans (Worm and Myers 2003). Subsequently, Nature published one extrapolation of current trends in loss of diversity and ecosystem function that predicted a global collapse of all commercial fisheries by 2048 (Worm et al 2006).

This research succeeded admirably in raising eyebrows, as well as criticism. Fisheries scientist Ray Hilborn (2007a) depicts the 2048 prediction as ridiculed by most fisheries scientists, and describes similar studies, including the precipitous decline of large predatory fish, as either outright wrong or serious distortions of reality (citing, for example, Hampton et al 2005). In addition, pronouncements from agencies such as FAO that seem dire at first glance such as listing the majority of fisheries as either fully or overexploited belie the fact that for many countries, full exploitation is the stated goal of fisheries policy. The list also says nothing about whether overfished stocks are recovering or not. Finally, Hilborn (2003) notes that in the U.S. context, most fisheries classified as overfished are still producing significant catches, so that even if they were pessimistically producing only half of their potential yield, U.S. production would [still] be at 84% of maximum which sounds very different than 75% overfished or fully exploited. The issue is not whether depletion is a widespread problem, but just how bad things have become, and what might be done to fix the problem. Part of this difference of opinion stems from the fact that fisheries can be managed for economic, biological, or social objectives. Not only are the criteria for success different in each of these cases, but also within similar fields, as is the case with fisheries scientists such as Hilborn and marine ecologists such as Myers and Worm. That social scientists are even less likely to agree on measures, let alone desired outcomes, only highlights the complexity of the issue. Measuring performance is crucial to understanding which fisheries are being successfully managed. This paper will focus on biological sustainability, as it lies at the heart of the sustainable development of marine resources. It will address the ways that institutional and political causes of depletion and the uncertain nature of fisheries science have undermined measures of biological

Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development

Measuring the biological sustainability of marine fisheries

sustainability; explore ways that success may be better measured; and conclude with a proposal for a new approach to measuring biological sustainability.

The Tragedy of the Commons and the regulatory response

Understanding what causes depletion under todays complex institutional, political, scientific, and economic institutions is not easy. At its core, however, is a simple explanation, one that has been known literally for ages. Aristotle (politics ii) noted that those things which are owned by the greatest number of people are the least well cared for. Some millennia later, the same idea was neatly encapsulated by Garrett Hardin (1968) when he coined the phrase the tragedy of the commons. Despite making a semantic mistake in his use of the word commons (he really meant open access1), Hardins basic point, that valuable resources free for the taking will inevitably be depleted, was spot on. Hardin drew primarily on the work of economists writing in the 1950s who modeled the choices faced in fisheries and pointed out the fundamental importance of property rights to resource stewardship and conservation. Property rights define who has the right to do what with a resource, including whether to exploit, conserve or deplete it. As H. Scott Gordon (1954) wrote, The fish in the sea are valueless to the fishermen, because there is no assurance that they will be there for him tomorrow if they are left behind today. With no incentive to leave fish in the sea, depletion naturally follows. Anthony Scott (1955) expanded upon the notion that no one will maintain a resource unless they have a residual claim to its production (i.e., a property right in the yield of the fishery) and extended the analysis to reflect the idea that the ideal standard of comparison for fishery management should be a sole owner who has complete control of the asset (the fishery) thereby eliminating the risk that anything left in the water could simply be caught by someone else. For most of the twentieth century, however, the blame for the decline of fisheries was laid at the feet of the fishers, which meant that the response from both scientists and management agencies was to devise restrictions and regulations designed to rein in these rapacious harvesters. But traditional restrictions on time (seasons), area, and technology (boats and fishing gear) do not address the underlying incentives that fishers face, and the tragedy remains. Under these circumstances, people whose livelihoods depend on fishing find ways around restrictions
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when it is worth their while to do so. The Alaska halibut fishery of the 1980s is often cited as an example of regulatory extremism. Managers in that fishery attempted to limit catches by shortening the fishing season, reasoning that less time on the water would result in less fish taken out of the water. Fishers responded with increased effort and better technology such as fish-finding sonar, so that in a relatively short period the season was reduced from over nine months to just two days, with no real decline in fish harvests (see Christy 1996). In other cases, depletion has been avoided, but at enormous economic cost, often in duplicated effort and capital resources spent trying to catch fish before someone else does. In the case of the northern lobster fisheries of the United States, the economist Frederick Bell (1972) found that over 50 per cent of the capital and labor employed in lobstering represent an uneconomic use of factors. In other words, Anthony Scotts hypothetical sole owner of the fishery would have harvested the same amount of fish over roughly the same period of time employing half the labor and capital. Another problem with fisheries regulation is that it often replaces existing formal and informal institutions such as those that Hardin famously and incorrectly lumped into the commons. Many of these institutions were fragile as they were based on custom and informal rules, so that once destroyed, they are very difficult to recreate. This is a problem particularly in those countries where foreign management regimes were imposed without consideration of the local context. This led the marine ecologist turned ethnographer Robert Johannes (1978) to observe that If there is an island somewhere in Oceania where marine resources are conserved more effectively today than they were before European contact, I have not heard of it. It is now well established that most fishers who depleted resources were simply responding rationally to the rules of the game presented to them. And despite the economic waste in the Alaskan and northern lobster examples, they were at least spared a collapse. But other well developed fisheries, most famously the cod stocks of New England and Atlantic Canada, did collapse. Where were the fisheries scientists? Were they well aware of depletion but ignored by fishery managers, or did they miss the boat? A little of both, it appears.

Fisheries science and uncertainty

For many years and even today, much of fisheries science and management is directed at finding the maximum

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sustainable yield (MSY) of a fishery. The theory is that a virgin (established but unfished) biomass produces fewer fish than one that is expanding to fill a niche. At the point along the curve of fishery production with the highest rate of increase, fishery harvests can be maximized Perhaps first among many problems with determining this curve and where a particular fish population lies along it, is that fish are hard to count. They are underwater and they move, often over great distances and over great depths. Even when sampling data show clear trends, multiple interpretations are still possible. To reach MSY, virgin stocks of fish will be fished down for a number of years, which means harvest levels are intentionally unsustainable. Eventually harvests decline and even out as the fishery stabilizes around MSY. Although the theory that fishing down a virgin biomass increases its productivity is generally accepted, there are a number of species where the largest and oldest fish are the most fecund. It is also widely accepted that the exploitation of fisheries lowers the average size and age of a population. The effects of natural variability on fish reproduction and mortality, and even on the location of fish, are very difficult to parse out from management effects, even after the fact. In its heyday, the Peruvian anchoveta accounted for over twenty percent of the worlds marine fish catch. When it crashed spectacularly in the 1970s it drew enormous attention from scientists, academics, and policy makers, yet even today academics still disagree about whether the cause was overfishing or natural variation, in particular the effects of El Nio weather patterns (Pauly et al 2002). Even what seems like the most obvious indicator of sustainability a stable catch over a number of years has recently been questioned by fishery scientists who analyzed data on fisheries collapses around the world since the 1950s. They found that one in five collapses followed a relatively long and stable persistence of high level of catches (Mullen, Freon and Cury 2005). They also found that nearly one in four fisheries (out of almost 1600 sampled) has experienced some kind of collapse, and that the number of collapses has remained constant since the 1950s. When the biomass and population dynamics of a fishery are largely unknown, how can one tell whether a decline in harvests is a sign of depletion or just the expected trajectory of a fishery on its way to reaching MSY? As Ludwig, Hilborn, and Walters (1993) point out, the diversity and complexity of fisheries means that optimum levels of exploitation must be determined by trial and error for each and every fishery. And this doesnt even begin to address other complicating non-

biological factors that can affect harvests, such as changes in technology that make it easier to find or harvest target species, or changes in market prices that make certain species more or less appealing to fishing pressure. Some leading fishery scientists believe that their profession will never attain scientific consensus on most exploited fisheries (Ludwig, Hilborn and Walters 1993). Why isnt fisheries management improving, or fisheries science getting more accurate? Fisheries modeling is improving, but it is also becoming more data-intensive, and data collection is expensive and complex, which can reduce the effectiveness of newer models (Pinnegar and Engelhard 2007). Another explanation from the ecological and environmental community is the notion of shifting baselines, an idea coined by Daniel Pauly (1995) to describe how each generation of fisheries scientist takes the current state of the world as the norm, instead of more accurately incorporating the past. For example, restoration targets from Atlantic cod to oysters in the Chesapeake Bay of the United States are commonly set at the levels of 2030 years ago, despite centuries of decline in those fisheries. Lest this all sound too pessimistic, Ray Hilborn, one of the authors of the pessimistic statement above, and his colleagues (Hilborn et al 2003), have documented a number of fishery success stories where the science and the management are both sound. Notable successes such as West Australian Rock Lobster, Alaska Salmon, and Pacific Halibut, however, are examples of single species management, while most of the worlds fisheries are part of a complex of species. They (Hilborn et al 2003) point out that fisheries science and in particular stock assessment have come a long way in the last 100 years, so much so that harvest guidelines that lead to long-term sustainability are easily calculated. The problem is, safeguarding against collapse is one thing; trying to identify and reach the population size that provides maximum harvest requires a much more detailed understanding of fish biology (Hilborn et al 2003). Maximizing yields from the fishery is more attractive to just about everyone, from politicians courting votes, to managers increasing the scope of their work and the size of their budgets, to ports and cities increasing employment, and, of course, to fishers looking to maximize returns.

Political economy of fisheries management

When politics collides with science, it provides even greater uncertainty and complication; something that has all too often been overlooked by fisheries scientists
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in the past. In an oft-cited paper from 1993 in Science, the fisheries scientists Donald Ludwig, Ray Hilborn and Carl Walters acknowledged that the short-sightedness of politics was a real problem, but gave the profit motive equal billing, attributing resource collapse to uncertain scientific information coupled with the promise of large profits. Many ecologists have discounted politics altogether. Cod is one of the most fecund marine fish species and had been plentiful off the coasts of Atlantic Canada and New England for centuries. After the Newfoundland cod fishery collapsed and was shut down in 1992, postmortems were common. One published by the US National Academy of Sciences likened the ability of the economic models used to manage the cod fishery to hit their targets with the difficulty of balancing a marble on top of a dome, and proposed basing fisheries management on ecological stability instead of yield (Roughgarden and Smith 1996). To prove the failure of yield-based models, they showed that from the late 1970s to the collapse in the early 1990s, harvest limits set by regulators and the actual harvests of fishers in the Newfoundland cod fishery were roughly equivalent, meaning that the fishery failed despite effective enforcement of the catch limits. In fact, those limits were not set by the models but by politicians, or at least by scientists pressured by politicians. A Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) audit in 1992 found that the science surrounding the health and management of the cod stocks was gruesomely mangled and corrupted to meet political ends (quoted in Brubaker 1999). The DFO also had a policy called the 50 percent rule, which meant that if the fishing industry bristled over proposed catch reduction, then DFO policy was to split the difference between the current harvest limit and the scientific target (Brubaker 1999). The fact that DFO harvest limits and actual catches lined up neatly therefore says little about the ability of economic models to set sustainable harvest limits2. It is also worth noting that by 1990, fishers in Newfoundland received CAD$1.60 in unemployment insurance for every dollar they made from the fishery (Brubaker 1999), so that the tragedy of the commons was further perverted by government benefits to fishers that increased as the fishery became more depleted. Newfoundland is an extreme example, but it underscores the widespread problem of politicized fishery science. Even the best fishery science is based on sampling, not complete information, so there will always be uncertainty in stock assessments. If the incentives of fishers, processors, scientists, bureaucrats, or politicians
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are not lined up with conservation and sustainability, then uncertainty gives politicians and interest groups an opportunity to press for their own agendas. In the race for fish, for example, market power is decidedly on the side of fish processors. When fishers are trying to catch as many fish as they can as fast as they can, they fish first and then worry about the prices they can get from fish processors. Management changes that end this race (discussed below) allow fishers to choose not to fish if they dont like the offered price. Needless to say, processors have a vested interest in maintaining a market advantage over their suppliers (see Matulich and Sever 1999). This has had a major impact on efforts to reform fishery management in the United States, and has even resulted in the creation of a special dispensation for processors in one Alaskan crab fishery that forces fishers to take their catch to a specific processor. The wedge of scientific uncertainty makes it easy to argue against reductions in catch, meaning that catches are easy to raise but tricky to lower. Even if special interests do not take on individual stock assessments, taking more interests into account drastically increases regulatory complexity, making any kind of decisive action that much more difficult (Healey and Hennessy 1998). As a result, more and more scientists and managers are realizing the importance of aligning economic objectives with conservation objectives, and there has been a shift away from the economics of MSY toward the economics of property rights in fisheries discussed by H. Scott Gordon and Anthony Scott. Ray Hilborn, for example, has recently written extensively about the importance of recognizing success in fisheries management, comparing and contrasting management institutions and the incentives that fishers face (Hilborn et al 2003, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, and Hilborn et al 2005). Others are joining Hilborn to suggest parameters necessary for successful fishery management, such as a recent Science article which suggested that legally enforceable and tested harvest strategies, coupled with appropriate rights-based incentives to the fishing community, [are needed] for the future of fisheries to be better than their past (Beddington et al 2007). Many of the fishery success stories, and most serious efforts to reform fisheries management, involve limited access and some kind of harvest rights, such as the provision for the creation of dedicated access privileges in the 2006 authorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (the overarching fishery management legislation in the United States). More commonly, access and harvest rights take the form of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs),

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especially in countries like Iceland, New Zealand and Australia, and some notable examples such as the Alaska Halibut fishery in the U.S. (which has stretched its two day season back to eight months).

Property rights and ITQs in New Zealand

An ITQ is a harvest right that assigns a percentage of a total commercial catch on an annual basis, and is also sometimes known as an Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ). If fishery scientists determine that a fishery can sustain a harvest of 100 tons in a particular year, the owner of a one percent ITQ then owns the right to harvest (or to sell or lease the right to harvest) one ton of fish for that particular year. At the very least these rights end the race to fish, and in some cases create economic incentives to conserve the resource. Iceland and New Zealand have the most comprehensive ITQ systems, but New Zealands Quota Management System (QMS) has adapted and evolved more than any other. Since ITQs were introduced in 1986, a series of conflict resolutions and legislative action have moved ITQs away from access privileges toward property rights (Batstone and Sharp 1999). One such upheaval came after the settlement of a lawsuit over the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, which guaranteed the native Maori full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their fisheries (see Stewart 2004). In the settlement, government bought quota and a share in one of the largest fishing companies in New Zealand for the Maori, who are still majority owners of Sea-Lord today. As a result, the QMS has the strong support of the politically active Maori. Subsequently, the 1996 Fisheries Act specified that ITQs are allocated in perpetuity and created a quota registry modeled on a land title registry. The strength of these rights appears to have created a vested interest in the long-term health of fisheries among quota owners (Batstone and Sharp 1999). Quota markets are functioning well as the rate of return to fish quota is comparable with other financial assets in New Zealand (Newell et al 2005). The 1996 Act also instituted cost recovery, which charges the fishing industry for stock assessments and fisheries science directly related to commercial fisheries. The fishing industry now actively funds both research and scientific review. There seems to be little question about the improvements in the economics and incentives created by the ITQ system, but evaluating the success of New Zealands QMS beyond these broad measures is proving difficult, even just for biological criteria. Both the fishing industry

and the Ministry of Fisheries tout their commitment to sustainable fishing, but most of the evidence lies in moderately stable catch histories and numerous examples where fishers have imposed catch reductions on themselves (unheard of in traditional fisheries management). The New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries (MFish) prioritizes stock assessments of New Zealands main commercial fisheries, and states that Of the 85 stocks for which we have sufficient information to characterise stock status, 72 (85%) are at or near target levels (MFish 2007). This sounds good, but are those targets really sustainable?

Measuring biological sustainability

With all of the aforementioned uncertainties inherent in fish stock assessments and population dynamics, it is not surprising that fisheries scientists and others have had difficulties in defining performance indicators for biological sustainability, let alone economic and social indicators which also affect biological sustainability. The New Zealand QMS seems to be a success, but in order to evaluate its effect on biological sustainability, there needs to be better performance measurement. Common biological performance measures include average catch, variance of catch, average stock size, minimum stock size, or probability of falling below some threshold level, but which one is chosen depends on fishery management objectives (Hilborn and Punt 1997). Comparison is even more difficult between countries, as species, data sets, and classification criteria such as overfished invariably differ. Most efforts by non-governmental organizations (notably the Marine Stewardship Council) and inter-governmental bodies (notably FAO) to measure fisheries sustainability set clear objectives but have vague criteria with which to measure them, whether biological, economic, or social. In a document aimed at setting and improving the measurement of indicators in fisheries, FAO suggests evaluating biological sustainability by looking at catch structure, relative abundance of target species, exploitation rate, direct effects of fishing gear on non-target species, indirect effects of fishing on trophic structure, direct effects of gear on habitats, species biodiversity, change in area and quality of important or critical habitats, and fished vs. unfished area (FAO 1999). Many of these are difficult to measure in the first place, which is compounded by the difficulties in comparing different standards of measurement across both fisheries and countries which cant even agree on what constitutes overfished.
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Measuring the biological sustainability of marine fisheries

The Marine Stewardship Council is a non-governmental organization based in London that certifies fisheries as sustainable with an eco-label. Founded in 1997 by Unilever and the World Wide Fund for Nature, it became independent in 1999. MSC has certified 26 fisheries as sustainable to date, and claims that 7% of the worlds edible, wild capture fisheries are either certified or in the process of being assessed (MSC 2007c). The MSCs (2007a) biological criteria (the primary focus of the program) for determining that a fishery is sustainable are that:
n

each fishery fell, asset values for paua (abalone) rose, asset values for snapper remained relatively constant, and asset values for hoki dropped (Statistics NZ 2007). On the other hand, a more specific study of the Gisborne rock lobster fishery demonstrated the link between asset value and biological health, as fishers purposefully increased their asset values by reducing their catches (Breen and Kendrick 1997). Trends in asset values should be easier to measure and compare across fisheries and countries, but the information they contain is still subject to significant noise from changes in regulations, export markets, and consumer preference, among others.

it can be continued indefinitely at a reasonable level; n it maintains and seeks to maximise ecological health and abundance; n it maintains the diversity, structure and function of the ecosystem on which it depends as well as the quality of its habitat, minimising the adverse effects that it causes. The MSC further clarifies each of these criteria, for example stating that a reasonable level of fishing is one that does not lead to over-fishing or depletion or that demonstrably leads to their recovery if a fishery is rebuilding. Beyond these efforts at clarification, the MSC guidelines are filled with phrases like does not threaten biological diversity, minimise mortality of [non-target] catch and implement appropriate fishing methods designed to minimise adverse impacts on habitat (MSC 2007a). Of course it would be almost impossible to quantify any of these criteria further across broad categories, but words like minimize, threaten, and appropriate leave open a very wide array of interpretations and subjectivity. Some fisheries scientists and economists have suggested the price of access to a fishery could be used as a proxy for biological data because it conveys information about the marketplaces long-term outlook for the fishery (Hilborn et al 2005). With its secure, transferable rights and active quota market, New Zealand should be a good testing ground of the theory that quota prices capitalize the expected future health of the fishery, and indeed, some economists have suggested that quota prices may be used as a guide to set limits on commercial fish catches (Batstone and Sharp 2003). New Zealand exports 90% of its fish, so factors such as foreign exchange rates and the volatility of international fish prices, as well as the small size of many of New Zealands fisheries are likely to affect asset value in ways unrelated to biological health. And indeed, comparing recent asset values to harvest limits for three different species shows that as harvests in
8

Using the likelihood of sustainability to measure performance

Fisheries management is a form of decision-making under uncertainty, but to date, the disciplines of decision analysis and management science, which deal with exactly this problem, have made few inroads into fisheries science3. One of the insights of decision analysis is to assess the quality of decisions as much if not more than outcomes. The difficulties of measuring results in fisheries short of total collapse mean that outcomes are very difficult to ascertain. Measuring the likelihood of biologically sustainability instead could be more practical and widely applicable/comparable. Thus, biological sustainability could be measured by looking at attributes of the inputs (harvest models) instead of the outputs (uncertain stock estimates that depend on uncertain population dynamics). Measuring inputs means evaluating how harvest models incorporate uncertainty, risk, and past performance. All three of these measures can be quantified or at least identified in the models, which would reduce the subjectivity of criteria setting. All fisheries modeling has to deal with uncertainty in some form or another, whether by simply taking a midpoint estimate or by incorporating more information about the possible variation around that midpoint. As the number of points incorporated into the model increases, or as the distribution moves from discrete to continuous, there will be more information used by the model, both about the level of uncertainty and the value of investing more time and effort in refining that variable (for example, one might find that recommended harvest levels are unchanged by reducing the uncertainty of a particular estimate, so there would be no point in refining that data point). Risk tolerance is also an important part of fisheries management and the evaluation of possible outcomes.

the electronic journal of sustainable development www.ejsd.org

In other words, how willing are managers and fishers to accept a chance that a particular harvest level will be unsustainable? The more explicitly risk averse a model is, the more likely the harvest is to be sustainable. A third indicator of the likelihood of sustainability is the incorporation of Bayesian statistical analysis into harvest models, which, simply put, incorporates past performance (outcomes) into the model. This has already been suggested and used by a number of fisheries scientists (Punt and Hilborn 1997), but seems rarely to be put into practice. But the individual nature of each fishery, and therefore the trial and error necessary to refine fishery models, suggests that historical comparisons are vital to model refinement. If the relationship between property rights and biological sustainability is significant, then one would expect to find that harvest models in New Zealand quantify risk attitude and are more risk-averse, use continuous probability distributions, and incorporate historical precedent more than fisheries elsewhere. One would also expect these attributes to be extant and better defined in fisheries where the property rights are more clearly defined. Indeed, Hilborn and Punts (1997) example of a Bayesian approach to fisheries management used the New Zealand hoki fishery as their model and data source. More research is needed, particularly in quantifying the risk, uncertainty, and incorporation of history in New Zealands fisheries models. Given the uncertain nature of just whats going on underwater, however, more attention needs to be paid to the likelihood of sustainable harvests as a comparative, empirical tool for understanding the effects of management institutions on biological sustainability.

and economic (such as the influence of foreign market demand) variables mean that there will always be a great deal of uncertainty surrounding population estimates. On the other hand, fishery models are easily measurable, as are their treatments of uncertainty and history. This paper suggests that rather than relying on biological data alone, measures of biological sustainability include the treatment of uncertainty and the influence of history (i.e. Bayesian priors) to determine comparative measures of the likelihood of biological sustainability. This would offer meaningful comparisons between management regimes and fisheries, in particular the ability to say which are more likely to be sustainable.

Notes
1. Research has shown that from the actively managed open fields in England to the rigidly defined, and often formally recognized marine tenure arrangements in the South Pacific and elsewhere, commons often have clearly defined boundaries and exclusive access for a welldefined group, and are often quite successful at mitigating depletion (see Johannes (1981), Cordell (1989), and Ostrom (1990)). 2. See McCay and Finlayson (1996) and Milich (1999) for more on the political economy of DFO policy before the Newfoundland cod collapse. 3. For a notable exception see Hilborn and Punt (1997).

Acknowledgements
The author would like to gratefully acknowledge research support from the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program and the Alex C. Walker Foundation Educational and Charitable Foundation.

Conclusions
The history of fisheries management is replete with failures to sustain yields of fish harvests, let alone the marine environment, coastal communities, or the economic viability of the fishing industry. What Garrett Hardin loosely described as the tragedy of the commons appears to have been a major factor, and as a result, limited access and quota management are common fishery management tools today. Fisheries science has also grown in sophistication in recent years, but much uncertainty remains even in population estimates of target populations. Better measures of biological sustainability are crucial for evaluating management changes in places like New Zealand. Natural variability combined with other scientific (for example simply finding fish underwater)

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Bell, F. 1972. Technological Externalities and CommonProperty Resources: An Empirical Study of the U.S. Northern Lobster Fishery Journal of Political Economy, 80: 14858. Breen, P.A. and T.H. Kendrick. 1997. A fisheries management success story: the Gisborne, New Zealand, fishery for red rock lobsters (Jasus edwardsii) Marine Freshwater Research, 48: 11031110. Brubaker, E. 1999. Cod Dont Vote: Filling fishermans quotas with paper fish The Next City, 4(2): 3441 and 5657 Christy, F. 1996. The Death Rattle of Open Access and the Advent of Property Rights Regimes in Fisheries Marine Resource Economics, 11: 287304. Cordell, J. 1989. A Sea of Small Boats. Cambridge, MA: Cultural Survival, Inc. FAO Fishery Resources Division (FAO). 1999. Indicators for sustainable development of marine capture fisheries FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries. No. 8. Rome: FAO. Gordon, H.S. 1954. The Economic Theory of a CommonProperty Resource: The Fishery Journal of Political Economy, 62:12442. Hardin, G. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons Science, 162: 1,24348. Healey, M.C. and T. Hennessey. 1998. The Paradox of Fairness: the impact of escalating complexity on fisheries management Marine Policy, 22(2): 109118, 1998 Hampton, J., Sibert, J.R., Kleiber, P., Maunder, M.N. and S.J. Harley. 2005. Fisheries: Decline of Pacific tuna populations exaggerated? Nature, 434: E1E2. Hilborn, R., Branch, T.A., Ernst, B., Magnusson, A ., MinteVera,C.V., Scheuerell, M.D., and J.L. Valero. 2003. State of the Worlds Fisheries Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 28: 359399 Hilborn, R. 2007a. Moving to Sustainability by Learning from Successful Fisheries Ambio, 36(4): 296303. Hilborn, R. 2007b. Defining success in fisheries and conflicts in objectives Marine Policy, 31: 153158 Hilborn, R. 2007c. Managing Fisheries is Managing People Fish and Fisheries, 8: 285296. Hilborn, R. and A. Punt. 1997. Fisheries stock assessment and decision analysis: the Bayesian approach. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries, 7: 3563. Hilborn, R., Orensanz, J.M. and A.M. Parma. 2005. Institutions, incentives and the future of fisheries Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 360: 4757 Johannes, R. 1978. Traditional Marine Conservation Methods in Oceania and their Demise Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 9: 34964. Ludwig, D., Hilborn, R., and C. Walters. 1993. Uncertainty, Resource Exploitation, and Conservation: Lessons from History Science, 260(5104): 17, 36.

Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, 16 U.S.C. 18011884. Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). 2007a. MSC Principles and Criteria for Sustainable Fishing. Downloaded from http://www.msc.org/html/ content_504.htm on Nov. 26, 2007 Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). 2007b. MSC Principles and Criteria for Sustainable Fishing: Guide to Principles, Criteria, Sub-criteria and Performance Indicators. Downloaded from on Nov. 26, 2007. Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). 2007c. About MSC. Downloaded from http://www.msc.org/html/ content_462.htm on Nov. 26, 2007 Matulich, Scott and M. Sever. 1999. Reconsidering the Initial Allocation of ITQs: The Search for a Pareto-Safe Allocation between Fishing and Processing Sectors Land Economics, 75(2): 203219. McCay, B.J. and A.C. Finlayson. 1996. The Political Ecology of Crisis and Institutional Change: The Case of the Northern Cod presented to annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., November 1519, 1995. Published electronically in Arctic Circle, January 15, 1996, available online at http:// arcticcircle.uconn.edu/ Milich, L. 1999. Resource Mismanagement Versus Sustainable Livelihoods: The Collapse of the Newfoundland Cod Fishery Society & Natural Resources, 12: 625642. Ministry of Fisheries, New Zealand (MFish). 2007. Status of Fisheries. Downloaded from http://www.fish.govt.nz/ en-nz/SOF/default.htm?WBCMODE=PresentationUn published%2cPresentationUnpublished on November 6, 2007. Mullon, C., Freon, P., and P. Cury. 2005. The dynamics of collapse in world fisheries Fish and Fisheries. 6: 111120 National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). 2002. Annual Report to Congress on the Status of U.S. Fisheries--2001, Silver Spring, MD: U.S. Dep. Commerce, NOAA, Natl. Mar. Fish. Serv. 142 p. Newell, R, Sanchirico, J. and S. Kerr. 2005. Fishing Quota Markets Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 49(3): 437462. Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pauly, D., Christensen, V., Gunette, S., Pitcher, T.J., Sumaila, U.R., Walters, C.J., Watson, R., and D. Zeller. 2002. Towards sustainability in world fisheries Nature, 418: 689695. Punt, Andre and R. Hilborn. 1997. Fisheries stock assessment and decision analysis: the Bayesian approach Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries, 7: 3563. Roughgarden, J. and F. Smith. 1996. Why fisheries collapse and what to do about it Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 93(10): 50785083.

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Scott, A. 1955. The Fishery: The Objectives of Sole Ownership Journal of Political Economy, 63: 63124. Statistics New Zealand. 2007. Fish Monetary Stock Account: 19962006. Downloaded from http://www. stats.govt.nz/analytical-reports/fish-monetary-stockaccount-19962006.htm on August 5, 2007. Stewart, C. 2004. Legislating for Property Rights in Fisheries. FAO Legislative Study 83. Rome: FAO.

Worm, B. and M. Ransom. 2003. Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities Nature, 423: 280283. Worm, B., Barbier, E.B., Beaumont, N., Duffy, J.E., Folke, C., Halpern, B.S., Jackson, J.B.C., Lotze, H.K., Micheli, F., Palumbi, S.R., Sala, E., Selkoe, K.A., Stachowicz, J.J., and R. Watson. 2006. Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services Science, 314: 787790.

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The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (2008) 1(2)

Sustainability of Fisheries
Rgnvaldur Hannesson*
* Rgnvaldur Hannesson is Professor of Fisheries Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration and Research Director at the Center for Fisheries Economics in Bergen, Norway. E-mail: rognvaldur.hannesson=a=nhh.no (replace =a= with @)

1. Introduction
In this paper I shall investigate the concept of sustainability as it applies to fisheries. In fact, the concept of sustainable yield is a time-honored one in fisheries science. Its application is, however, more complicated than simple, deterministic fishery models might lead one to believe. While useful pedagogical devices, such models have the potential to mislead if instead they are applied to contexts in which environmental fluctuations unrelated to fishing effort play a major role in determining fish stocks and fish catches. As is shown below, the catches from and abundance of stocks subject to environmental fluctuations vary over time, sometimes formidably. Yet the exploitation of such stocks can be sustainable, in the sense that the stocks survive and sustain ongoing exploitation. In fact sustainable exploitation of such stocks is likely to imply a variable rate of exploitation, one that is adjusted to the conditions at each time. But unless such adjustment is timely and prudent, the results could be disastrous. There are several cases of stock collapses on record, although few appear irreversible. What, then, prevents a timely and prudent adjustment? Sometimes collapses have occurred despite a declared objective of conservative exploitation. Sometimes recent advances in technology coupled with adverse environmental conditions have led to collapses. And sometimes the experience probably was insufficient for identify looming threats and how to respond to them. Finally, sustainable exploitation could lose its relevance, because of changing needs and perceptions. As a useful background, I shall begin (next section) with some critical remarks about the concept of sustainability in a general economic context. This is followed (Section 3) by a bare bones outline of the deterministic fisheries model, in order to show that even in this very simple context, the concept of sustainability alone does not lead us very far towards deciding what particular fishing strategy to apply. In Section 4, I introduce

environmental fluctuations, looking at the NortheastArctic cod over the past one hundred years. The fisheries exploiting this stock are still alive and thriving, indicating the possibility of sustainability against considerable odds. Section 5 considers four serious cases of fishery collapses, each offering its own lessons as well as highlighting the relative importance of environmental and institutional factors. Finally, I draw on the foregoing analysis to consider the institutional arrangements that promote sustainable fisheries.

2. Sustainable development: some critical issues

The coining of the phrase sustainable development must be considered a major success. Few phrases ring more often in our ears. It has given rise to a voluminous literature on what it means -- a literature that is still growing, which suggests that it is perhaps a greater success from the point of view of sloganeering than of clarity. Quite often, people seem to use it for things that for want of a better term might be described as great and good, whether or not they have anything to do with development, sustainable or otherwise. Not all of the blame for this should be laid at the threshold of the initiators of the concept; much of it rests with muddled thinking by those who have found sustainable development a convenient phrase. The definition given by the Brundtland Commission, development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, (WCED 1987, 8) was undoubtedly well-intended, and one can understand its appeal. Compromising the future of ones children through profligacy has never been regarded as an honorable behavior. The problem with sustainable development lies in giving it precise meaning and making it operational. Is sustainable something that is repeated over and over again without any change? What, then, happened to

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development? And if change takes place, what, then, is sustained? Here the many who have tried to breathe some meaning into the famous phrase have offered various proposals. The most intuitively appealing proposal is, perhaps, that consumption per capita should never fall. But consumption is a many-dimensional thing. In a growing economy where technology is constantly changing and new gadgets and services are continuously being developed, it is not straightforward to find a onedimensional expression for consumption. Leaving such nitpicking aside, the bigger message is that in a growing economy with technological change, satisfying the needs of any generation is a process that is constantly evolving. Even the definition of needs is liable to change over time and space. What some regard as needs in rich countries today were aspirations hardly anyone had imagined a hundred years ago. Is provision of safe drinking water a need? In the cities of the industrial revolution it was not available. Hundreds of millions of people still do not have that need satisfied even today. Is access to medical services a need? Most of the medical technologies we take for granted in rich countries today did not exist a hundred years ago, and even now they are not available to the poorest people of the world. Our Common Future, the report that spawned the notion of sustainable development, arose partly because of worries that non-renewable natural resources are finite and perhaps overused (WCED 1987, 6). But no use whatever of such resources can be characterized as sustainable in the truly long term. If they are to be used at all, then, sustainability can only be achieved by substituting other resources (including human resources and renewable resources). If we look back in history, we see just that: one process or resource is replaced by another (whale oil was replaced by crude oil; the internal combustion engine replaced horses; email has to some degree replaced snail mail; mp3s are replacing CDs, which replaced vinyl records; etc.), and at the same time living standards have continued to improve. Given that, one may wonder how it was that the instigators of the World Commission on Environment and Development ever got the idea that sustainability of the modern industrial civilization is a problem. Narrowing the focus from sustainable development in the world as a whole or some part thereof to one particular sector, in this case fisheries, simplifies the problem a great deal. We are much less troubled by multi-dimensional outputs, and there are in general far fewer variables to be handled. In fact, ever since fisheries science began
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to develop over a hundred years ago, one of its basic concepts has been sustainable yield of fish stocks (Smith 1994). But even here, as we shall see, defining sustainable yield and making it operational is not without problems. There is enormous natural variability to be reckoned with. There is also technological progress. And there is change in human values that affect the relevance of sustainable yield from a particular fish stock or its trade-off vis--vis other goods.

3. Sustainable fisheries in a deterministic world

Fish stocks are renewable resources. If left alone, the oceans do not fill up entirely with fish, so one may surmise that there is some kind of a natural equilibrium in which growth is balanced by deaths. Many of the worlds fish stocks have been exploited since time immemorial and are still around. Since fishing reduces stocks below their natural equilibrium, it may be concluded that catching fish results in surplus growth in excess of natural deaths, and so fishing at some level can be continued indefinitely without destroying the fishery. But no fish generate no fish, and small fish stocks are perhaps not self-sustaining. Indeed, the surplus growth of fish stocks can be thought of as a rising function of the stock size, beginning at some low level (perhaps zero), rising up to a certain point, falling to zero again at the natural equilibrium, and then becoming negative so that any stock size greater than the natural equilibrium automatically tends to fall back to that level. Figure 1 shows such a curve generated by the famous logistic

Figure 1 Surplus growth (G) of a fish stock (S) generated by the logistic growth function G(S) = rS(1 S/K) with r = 0.5 and K = 1.
0.14 0.12 0.10 Surplus growth (G) 0.08 0.06 0.04 0.02 0.00

0.02 0.04 0.06 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 1.1 Population size (S)

the electronic journal of sustainable development www.ejsd.org

growth model. (The main attraction of that model is mathematical convenience, but it captures adequately the hypothesized hump shape of the stock growth curve.) A basic proposition that follows from this simple model is that if fishing never exceeds the surplus growth of fish, it could be sustained indefinitely. The stock could be held in an equilibrium below the natural one (where the curve intersects the stock-axis from above and left), provided the deaths caused by fishing exactly match the surplus growth (growth in excess of natural deaths). But the concept of sustainability alone does not get us very far. As Figure 1 demonstrates, there is a wide range of sustainable yields to choose from, from zero to the maximum. And associated with each particular sustainable yield, except the maximal one, are two different levels of the fish stock; we can take any particular sustainable yield from either a small or a large stock. The reader is perhaps tempted to conclude that it would be better to take any given sustainable yield from a large stock, because a large stock would be more resilient to any environmental catastrophe that might occur. But this would take us beyond the deterministic world underlying the surplus growth function in Figure 1 and would pose a whole new set of problems for the sustainability concept, which we shall address below. There are, however, economic arguments which would make the larger of the two stock levels more attractive; for example, it is probably cheaper to catch any given amount of fish from a large stock than from a small stock. But economic arguments can pull both ways. Suppose the cost per unit of fish landed is unrelated to the size of stock being exploited. It would not matter, then, whether we take any given sustainable yield from a large or a small stock. In fact, there would be an advantage in taking it from the smaller stock. Fishing down the stock to the smaller of the two levels would give us a once and for all gain (in the form of a larger initial yield), but once we are at our desired sustainable yield, we would catch the same amount that we would have obtained from the larger stock. More generally, there is a trade-off between the once and for all gain we can realize by fishing down the stock and the loss we would incur by taking the sustainable yield from a smaller stock than necessary. Unsurprisingly, this trade-off is affected by the discount rate: if the discount rate is higher than the highest possible return on the fish stock, it would make sense to deplete the stock and invest the profit in a more productive asset.1 Those who balk at such a conclusion can seek comfort in the possibility that if the stock has a value as such, for environmental reasons for example, it might not be a good

idea to deplete it beyond repair. But the example serves to point out that it is the negligible rate of growth that makes utilization of non-renewable resources unsustainable (no matter how desirable their use may be) and that the distinction between sustainable and non-sustainable use of resources is a question of the rate of return on deferred use and not of zero versus positive rate of growth, however small.

4. Sustainability in a variable environment

The surplus growth curve in Figure 1 assumes a fully deterministic world, the growth of the fish being fully determined by the size of the stock. By choosing the level of fishing, we can fully control the fish stock and its surplus growth. This is a gross and in many cases misleading simplification. The growth of fish stocks is affected by environmental conditions that have nothing to do with fishing; sometimes these conditions even dwarf the effects of fishing and make them very difficult to identify. In fact, up to the late 19th century it was received wisdom among the most prominent biologists of the world that fishing had a negligible effect on the growth of fish stocks and that the fish resources of the oceans were for all practical purposes inexhaustible (Smith 1994). This received wisdom has long since been thoroughly discredited, and the surplus growth curve in Figure 1 and similar constructions are useful pedagogical devices to drive home the point that fish resources are limited and must be exploited with due care for the future consequences. But anyone intending to use such models for taking real world decisions about how much to fish in any particular season will be disappointed. When environmental conditions are good, we are likely to be able to take more than otherwise without doing much harm to future fishing. And what if fish stocks are subject to recurring environmental catastrophes which can neither be controlled nor predicted? Would it not then be sensible to catch the fish while they are still around, since they might be gone tomorrow? I shall revisit that question in the next section. Let me illustrate, first, the point about variability by considering the case of the Northeast Arctic cod, one of the fish stocks for which we have the longest time series. Figure 2 shows the catches from and the biomass of this stock. There is enormous inter-annual variability in both. The trends are in opposite directions; while the stock has trended downwards, the catches have trended upwards, reflecting increasing pressure from the fishing industry. Nevertheless the catches follow the variations
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in the stock size rather closely. For the period after 1976 this is in part a consequence of the fact that the stock has been managed by an overall catch quota set on the basis of the abundance of the stock, although there has been substantial fishing above quota and some unregulated fishing as well. But even before 1977 there is a close relationship between the catches and the size of the stock. The reason is that the larger the stock, the more fish any given fishing effort is likely to catch. Because of this there is also likely to be less fishing activity if the stock is small than when it is abundant. The stock fluctuations are largely driven by variability in the recruitment of young fish. Figure 3 shows the recruitment of 3-year old fish to the stock since 1913. The largest year classes of fish are more than an order of magnitude greater than the smallest ones. It has not proven easy to relate these fluctuations to variations in the mature part of the stock; they seem to be driven by variations in the environment. As Figure 3 shows, very large year classes occur at somewhat irregular intervals, with the period 19451975 being somewhat exceptional in having some extraordinarily large year classes. One might be tempted to conclude that some kind of regime shift occurred in the ocean some time after 1970, but in fact it is possible to produce a similar pattern by purely random fluctuations coupled with a simple serial correlation (Hannesson 2007). Despite these fluctuations, the Northeast Arctic cod fishery has turned out to be sustainable in the sense that the stock is still around (even if it is smaller than it was

before the mid-1970s) and since 1990 has been trending upwards rather than downwards. The fishery is also thriving, even if the volume of catches has declined since the 1950s and 60s. Since the fishery was essentially unregulated before 1977, this may be regarded as fortuitous. Since 1977 the fishery has been regulated by an overall quota. Although the quota has often been exceeded, sometimes on a large scale, it is likely to have contributed to preserving the fishery in a viable state. Note that the catches in this fishery have varied a great deal. Since 1977, this variability has been managed under the quota regime, with the overall quota being adapted to the conditions of the stock at particular points in time. In general and notwithstanding the breaches of the quota the variation in catch has broadly been desirable, in that it has promoted continued sustainability of the fishery. More generally, environment-driven fluctuations, such as the ones characterizing the Northeast Arctic cod, force us to ask ourselves how such fluctuations might be best dealt with. Sustainable exploitation in this context means preserving the stock and the fishery in a viable state for an indefinite period of time, but it is highly likely to also mean adapting the annual catch volume and the activity and capacity of the fishing fleet to the condition of the stock at each particular time. Declining catch volumes and stock levels do not necessarily indicate unsustainable exploitation; on the contrary this could be a warranted adjustment to adverse conditions in the environment. It might be feasible to stabilize the annual catch from this

Figure 2 Catches (includes estimated unreported catches) from and stock size of the Northeast Arctic cod
6,000 5,000 Stock (000s tonnes) 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0
00 20 90 19 80 19 70 19 60 19 50 19 19 19 19 19 19 30 40 10 20 00

Figure 3 Recruitment of 3-year old fish to the Northeast Arctic cod stock Million fish
2,000 1,800 1,600

Stock Catch

1,600 1,400 Catch (000s tonnes) 1,200 1,000 800 600 400 200 0

1,400 1,200 1,000 800 600 400 200 0

19 13 19 23 19 33 19 43 19 53 19 63 19 83 19 20 19 73 93 03

Population size (S)

Sources: ICES, Arctic Working Group Report 2007, Table 3.27, and Institute of Marine Research, Bergen

Sources: ICES, Arctic Working Group Report 2007, Table 3.27, and Institute of Marine Research, Bergen

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and other similar stocks, but such stabilization could mean an unreasonably small catch, since stabilizing the catch would mean a relatively intense exploitation of a small stock, making it more vulnerable (Hannesson and Steinshamn 1990).

5. Fishery collapses
Some fisheries have developed very differently from the fishery for the Northeast Arctic cod and collapsed. Figures 47 track these sad stories (which are not the only ones of their kind). Common to all four is a sudden and unexpected collapse. Three of these fisheries have recovered, after a prolonged period in the doldrums. In all four cases both environmental conditions and overfishing were involved, but to different degrees. While the reasons for these collapses may still be subject to debate, they clearly pose different challenges with respect to sustainable fishing. The collapse of the Peruvian anchovy fishery occurred after about a decade of rapid expansion, during which the fishery became a significant player in the Peruvian economy. The collapse in 1972 came during an El Nio, an event which is harmful for the growth and recruitment of the anchovy. It was long known that El Nios come at irregular intervals, but their portents for the anchovy fishery had not yet been learnt; the fishery was not reined back in a timely fashion, the anchovy stock was fished down and took 20 years to recover fully. The

contrast with 1997 is striking. That year was also an El Nio year, but the fishery was severely curtailed, and the fish stock recovered after only one year. Since then, catches have varied, due to variable environmental conditions, but a collapse has been avoided.2 The Atlanto-Scandian herring fishery collapsed suddenly in the late 1960s.3 There is little doubt that the main reason was a sudden improvement in technology coupled with the absence of any overall regulation. Two kinds of technological change were involved. Mechanical winches replaced brute manpower in hauling the gear with which the fish were caught, making it possible to use much bigger seines and boats. Secondly, sonar made it possible to search for fish under water in all directions and locate the shoals of fish. The fish no longer found refuge in the depth and darkness of the sea, and the last herring shoal might very well have been swept up if the fishery had not been stopped in the early 1970s. It took over 20 years for the fishery to recover. What complicates the story is that the 1960s were a cold period in the Northeast Atlantic. It has been shown that herring catches have a long-term correlation with temperature in this area, so some decline of the herring fishery could have been expected in any case (Toresen and stvedt 2000). Throughout history herring catches have always fluctuated, undoubtedly for environmental reasons that still are not fully understood. The catches of the California sardine declined steeply after 1950, and in the 1960s the fishery was banned. The fish stock recovered in the 1980s, and in the 1990s the ban

Figure 4 Catches of Peruvian anchovy Million tonnes

14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0
05 20 00 20 95 19 90 19 85 19 80 19 75 19 19 50 19 60 19 55 70 19 65 19

Figure 5 Catches of Atlanto-Scandian herring Million tonnes

2.5

2.0

1.5

1.0

0.5

0.0
19 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 19 55 19 19 19 50 60 65 80 85 90 95 00 05 75 70

Source: FAO Fisheries Database

Sources: ICES, Northern Pelagic and Blue Whiting Working Group Report 2006, Table 3.5.2.1 and Institute of Marine Research, Bergen

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Figure 6 Catches (California) of California sardine Thousand tonnes

700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0
19 32 19 19 19 42 19 52 19 62 19 82 20 72 92 02

Figure 7 Catches of the Northern cod of Newfoundland Thousand tonnes

900 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0
18 90 19 80 19 70 19 60 19 50 19 40 19 30 19 20 19 10 19 00 19 90 18 80 18 70 18 60 18 50

Source: NOAA Southwest Fisheries Center, La Jolla

Source: Dr. Ram Meyers, Canada Fisheries and Oceans, Newfoundland laboratory

on catches was lifted. The sardine catches are nowhere near the levels of their heydays in the 1930s and 40s, partly because the processing industry that turned sardines into meal and oil is long gone. In fact the anchovy fishery of Peru and similar fisheries elsewhere developed partly because of the disappearance of the California sardine and the resulting effect on the supply of fish meal (Glantz 1992). Initially the collapse of the sardine fishery was blamed on overfishing. This was challenged by results from drilling into sediments off the coast of California. These results showed that the frequency of sardine scales in the sediments varied greatly over time, long before any fishery for sardines had developed, indicating that the sardine stock had varied in the past for reasons that have nothing to do with fishing (Baumgartner, Soutar and Ferreira-Bartrina 1992). Presumably these collapses in the past were caused by environmental fluctuations. Later analyses have shown that the recruitment to the sardine stock is adversely affected if ocean temperatures diverge from a certain interval that apparently is advantageous for sardine survival ( Jacobson et al. 2005). This finding challenges the paradigm of sustainability. If a fish stock is doomed to disappear as a commercially interesting venture, are we not better off, then, taking more than we would otherwise? The prospects for future growth might be rendered null and void by adverse environmental changes over which we have no control, frustrating our attempts to improve our future fishery. A formal analysis of this problem, taking into account that
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a stock might collapse with a certain probability, shows that we should fish more and set aside less in this case than we otherwise would ( Johnston and Sutinen 1996). The Northern cod of Newfoundland is perhaps the most troublesome story of the four. Newfoundlands raison dtre as a part of the British Empire was its rich cod fishery, which continued uninterrupted through recorded history, notwithstanding some inter-annual fluctuations that characterize almost all fish stocks. In the 1960s, the catches from this stock reached unprecedented heights, due to the arrival of factory trawlers from the Soviet Union and other communist countries. The impressive fishing power of these vessels and fears that they would deplete the fish stocks were an important driving force behind the new law of the sea, which in the 1970s awarded jurisdiction over natural resources, including fish, to the nearest coastal state, up to a distance of 200 nautical miles from shore. The new law of the sea put most of the area inhabited by the Northern cod under Canadian jurisdiction. While foreign fishing vessels were banished from the area, the Canadian fishing fleet expanded formidably. A limit was set on the catches and, as a result, they went down substantially, but not sufficiently to conserve the stock. The total catch was supposed to be set on the basis of a conservative criterion (the so-called F0.1 criterion), but apparently the Canadian scientists seriously misjudged the size of the stock and the fishing mortality to which it had been subjected (Alverson 1987; Harris 1990; Hutchings and Meyers 1994). Environmental and technological

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factors also played a role in the decline of the stock; lower ocean temperatures adversely affected the growth of the stock and led to its aggregation in warm water pockets, where it was promptly found by trawlers equipped with modern fish finding devices, scooping up virtually the last remains of the stock. In 1992, the fishery was closed and has since only been reopened sporadically on an experimental basis. To date, the stock has not yet recovered to an extent that would allow a regular fishery. The Northern cod debacle is that much more deplorable as Canada has some of the best fisheries scientists in the world and intended to manage the stock conservatively. Yet it failed miserably. It is implausible that the Canadian government should have deliberately permitted the stock to be fished out for some political expediency; as it turned out, the economic problems accompanying the collapse quickly hit the Canadian government right in the face. The Canadian government can, however, be criticized for not cutting the catches sufficiently and soon enough. For many years the fishing industry of Newfoundland had been regarded as a means of keeping people employed in the province, irrespective of their contribution to the Canadian economy. The industry was subsidized to such an extent that it can be doubted whether its contribution to the overall economy of the country was in fact positive (Schrank et al. 1995). The political fallout from severe cuts in catches and the accompanying increases in unemployment made the Canadian government reluctant to take sufficiently timely and severe measures as the Northern cod debacle unfolded, but it ended up with a much worse problem. A possible contributing factor to the Northern cod debacle is the fact that the stock was not fully confined to the Canadian economic jurisdiction. Parts of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland are outside the 200-mile economic zone and accessible by fishing fleets from other countries. Foreign fleets, especially from Spain and Portugal, fished the Northern cod in this area, and for years the European Union ignored Canadian requests to reduce its fishing and set conservative quotas.4

6. Which institutional arrangements promote sustainability?

Until the new law of the sea emerged in the 1970s, most fish stocks were common property resources which anyone could access at will. The fate of such resources is well known. It was popularized by Hardins famous article (Hardin 1968) about the tragedy of the commons, but the basic theory had been developed much earlier

in the context of fisheries (Gordon 1954; Warming 1911, translated and introduced to the international community by Andersen (1983)). There is every reason to expect sustainable exploitation of common property resources to be the exception rather than the rule, especially if the community is large and its limits ill-defined. We have seen resource depletion being played out over a very short period of time for many terrestrial animals, such as the American bison (Buffalo Bill killed more than four thousand of them in eight months to feed construction workers on the Union Pacific Railroad).5 But even the primitive technology of stone-age man permitted him to kill off many species of large animals which were easily found and hunted (Smith 1975, Diamond 2005). Why most of the fish stocks of the world have been exploited sustainably, in the sense that they are still around and supporting fisheries, is due to the difficulty of finding the last fish, or more precisely of reducing fish stocks below levels at which they can reproduce and grow. In the last century, fishing technology grew by leaps and bounds, making it possible to reduce fish stocks below critical levels of viability. This led to a scramble for extended jurisdiction over fisheries and other resources at sea. The coastal states of the world, some of which owed much of their living standards to the fish resources off their shores, were in no mood to let fishing fleets from distant nations destroy their livelihoods. As the leading powers of the world at the time, the United States and the Soviet Union, concurred in the extension of national jurisdiction over the sea (if for their own reasons), this aspiration made its way into international law. The establishment of national jurisdiction over fish stocks to a significant degree ensured that they were not destroyed through unfettered access by fishing fleets employing the latest technologies. However, the Northern cod debacle shows that national jurisdiction over fish stocks may be a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition for their sustainable use. For many fish stocks, the 200-mile zone does not establish jurisdiction over their entire habitat. In a great many cases, however, it limits the interested parties to a finite number, and usually a small one, making it possible for them to agree on a profitable strategy of utilization without thereby attracting challengers operating under the freedom of access to the high seas. Many fish stocks are, however, to a varying degree accessible outside the 200-mile jurisdiction, and this area is in principle open to anyone. This limits the efficacy of the 200-mile jurisdiction; the management of fish stocks that migrate far and wide would be much easier if national jurisdiction were extended to cover all of the worlds oceans.
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sustainability of fisheries

While national jurisdiction is a necessary condition for sustainability, it is not as noted sufficient in itself. So which institutional framework does supply the sufficient conditions? Clearly defined property rights over fish stocks would appear to be one such institution. A colleague of mine once asked the rhetorical question why isnt the pig an endangered species? Applying the same kind of ownership arrangement to fish as to pigs seems an eminently sensible way of ensuring the continued existence of fish stocks. Provided the rate of growth of the stocks is high enough to make them attractive as investment objects, the private owner would have a strong interest in preserving a sufficiently large stock to ensure future catches. Yet we hardly see any such arrangements; the only marine animals to which private property rights arrangements are applied are oysters, and then only in certain places. There are several reasons for this. First, most fish stocks migrate far and wide, so enforcement of private property rights would be difficult. Second, migration of fish stocks between different jurisdictions makes it difficult to apply private property rights; it would entail a farreaching cooperation among the states involved. Third, environmental concerns are increasingly being used as a justification for reducing catch levels.6 It bears noting that the rights to fish quota allocations that have developed over the last thirty years or so, often called individual transferable quotas (ITQs), do not amount to property rights to fish stocks. They are use rights, i.e., rights to catch a certain amount of fish over a certain period of time, usually a certain fraction of a total catch quota within a calendar year. While such rights are useful for encouraging an economically efficient utilization of a given fish quota and providing incentives to match fishing fleets to the long term catch prospects, in most cases they give the right holder no direct control over the resource base, i.e., the fish stock. Moreover, the total catch quota is usually determined by public authorities and not by the industry. ITQ regimes such as the one in Iceland are often wrongly accused of failing to rebuild depleted fish stocks, when the real culprits are politicians who sometimes give chosen segments of the industry a right to exceed their catch quotas. Furthermore, most governments which have put ITQs in place have been reluctant to make them private property in the fullest sense of the word; more often than not, the right to reallocate individual catch quotas and to do so without compensation has been explicitly asserted. This can only serve to blunt the incentives to conserve and to invest for the long term. That said, it is highly likely that ITQs have promoted fish stock conservation by giving
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individual fishing firms an asset whose value depends crucially on how well the fish stocks are managed. This, however, requires collective action; there is little the individual firm can do in isolation to promote conservation, and indeed it has an incentive to do the opposite by exceeding its quota, much as a member of a cartel has an incentive to produce over quota (see Hannesson (2004) for characteristics of and different experiences with ITQs).

7. Conclusion
Above it was shown that whether or not fish stocks should be exploited sustainably is a question of (1) their rate of growth compared to the rate of return on alternative investment, (2) the sensitivity of the unit cost of fish to the size of the fish stock, and (3) whether fish stocks have a value beyond their consumptive value. But even if we rule out the mining of fish stocks as an unlikely strategy, the application of the sustainability concept poses formidable operational problems. What would be the appropriate stock and catch level in a deterministic environment? There are many candidates for sustainability. And given that all fish stocks in the wild are subject to environmental fluctuations, how should the level of exploitation be modified to take account of these shifting fortunes? It is unlikely, although not entirely impossible, that sustainability in a variable environment would mean taking the same catch year after year or season after season. Furthermore, if the environment is so variable as to make some stocks virtually vanish for a prolonged period of time, how much weight should be put on the future? The more uncertain the future availability of the stock, the less that weight should be, and if the stock is virtually certain to disappear we would not care about sustainability at all. I began this article by discussing changing technology and needs. These pose their own challenges to sustainable use of fish stocks. One of the collapse stories above (the Atlanto-Scandian herring) was attributed to a rapid technological change, the effects of which were not foreseen and were only belatedly understood. Technical change also contributed to the Northern cod debacle, through ever-more efficient trawlers and up-to-date fish-finding equipment. Such challenges will continue to be posed in the future. It will not always be possible to foresee the effects of technological change; it is likely that we will only learn about them through experience. This implies that mistakes will continue to be made as a necessary prerequisite for learning how to cope with the

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challenges of a new technology. The Peruvian anchovy story may not be so dissimilar; how could one know how to respond to the challenges of an El Nio event until it had played out? This makes it all the more essential that institutions be structured in such a way as to enable learning to take place. Lastly there are the changing needs of humans. Since time immemorial, fish, whales and seals have been hunted for food and for materials such as fats and hides. Recently large, or at least vocal, parts of humanity have come to see some of those activities as immoral, especially seal and whale hunting. It has probably helped in that regard that the needs satisfied by seal and whale products can now be satisfied in many other ways, so that these activities are not critically important in any sense, except perhaps for some impoverished hunters in Greenland and Canada who used to get some income from selling seal skins. Sustainable exploitation of these animals has long since lost its meaning, although sustainability of stocks is occasionally advanced as a vicarious argument by some environmental advocacy groups who wish to ban the hunting of these animals altogether. Could the same happen to fisheries? The argument is increasingly being advanced that fish stocks must be managed so as to set aside sufficient forage for marine mammals. Such changes in needs of course have implications for how we choose between alternative but still sustainable fish management strategies.

Notes
1. The optimal trade-off is characterized by the equation (for a derivation, see Clark (1976)): r = G(S) c(S)G(S) p c(S) where r is the discount rate, G(S) is the surplus growth, c(S) is the unit cost of fish, p is the price of fish, and apostrophe denotes derivative. If the unit cost of fish is constant and independent of the stock, the last term on the right hand side would vanish, and the optimum stock would be on the left side of the maximum of the surplus growth curve in Figure 1; or, in other words, we should take the sustainable yield from the smaller of the two stock levels supporting it. Since p c(S) > 0 in any profitable fishery and c(S) 0 (a larger stock will, if anything, lower the unit cost of fish), the stock-dependent unit cost of fish pulls the optimal stock level to the right in Figure 1 and possibly to the right side of the maximum of the surplus growth curve. If the unit cost of fish is independent of the stock and the last term on the right vanishes, we could have a situation where sustainable use is not the optimal policy.

If the marginal growth rate of the stock (G(S)) is very low even for the smallest viable stock level (zero in Figure 1), we could have a situation where G(0) < r. What this means is that the stock is so unproductive that it does not pay to invest in it. Any fish we do not take immediately can be regarded as an investment, yielding a return in the form of enhanced stock growth and lower future costs of fishing. This return must be compared with the rate of return on alternative investment. 2. The Monterey Aquarium, notorious for its environmental agenda, displays a diagram of the catches of the Peruvian anchovy as an example of how overfishing leads to collapses of fish stocks. The diagram ends in 1983, when catches had fallen to near-zero. As of July 2002 the Aquarium had not updated its depiction of this story, in spite of the fact that the fishery had recovered. 3. In recent years this herring stock has been mainly known as Norwegian spring spawning herring, as the fish spawn off the Norwegian coast. Before the collapse in the 1960s there were also spring spawning herring stocks near Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, and even near Greenland during the warm period of the 1920s and 30s (Vilhjlmsson 1997), but these stocks now appear to be extinct. 4. After 1977 fishing by foreign fishing fleets was greatly reduced, so their activities were hardly decisive, but certainly unhelpful. See Hannesson (1996, 90). 5. According to his memoirs (Cody 1904), p. viii. 6. For example, fish are either seen as animals worthy of preservation as such or as forage for other types of fish or marine mammals that certain groups seek to preserve. Absent government regulation, the fishing industry would be unlikely to take such considerations into account unless it were compensated for the reduction in revenue.

References
Alverson, D.L. (Chairman). 1987. A Study of Trends of Cod Stocks off Newfoundland and Factors Influencing Their Abundance and Availability to the Inshore Fishery. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Ottawa. Andersen, P. 1983. On rent of fishing grounds: A translation of Jens Warmings 1911 article, with an introduction. History of Political Economy 15:3916. Baumgartner, T.R., Soutar, A., and V. Ferreira-Bartrina. 1992. Reconstruction of the history of Pacific sardine and northern anchovy populations over the past two millennia from sediments of the Santa Barbara basin, California. CALCOFI Rep. 33:2440. Clark, C.W. 1976. Mathematical Bioeconomics. New York: Wiley.

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Cody, W.F. 1904. The Adventures of Buffalo Bill Cody, 1st ed., New York and London: Harper & Brother. Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse. New York and London: Viking Penguin. Glantz, M. (Ed.). 1992. Climate Variability, Climate Change and Fisheries. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, H.S. 1954. The economic theory of a common property resource: the fishery. Journal of Political Economy 62:12442. Hannesson, R. 1993. Bioeconomic Analysis of Fisheries. Oxford: Blackwell. Hannesson, R. 2007. Cheating about the cod. Marine Policy 31:698705. Hannesson, R. 2004. The Privatization of the Oceans. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hannesson, R. and S.I. Steinshamn. 1991. How to Set Catch Quotas: Constant Effort or Constant Catch? Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 20:7191. Hardin, G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162:12437. Harris, L. (Chairman). 1990. Independent Review of the State of the Northern Cod Stock. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Ottawa. Hutchings, J.A. and R.A. Meyers. 1994. What can be learned from the collapse of a renewable resource? Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 51:212646. Jacobson, L.D., Bograd, S.J., Parrish, R.H., Mendelssohn, R. and F.B. Schwing. 2005. An ecosystem-based hypothesis for climatic effects on surplus production in California sardine (Sardinops sagax) and environmentally dependent surplus production models. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science 62:17821796.

Johnston, R.J. and J.G. Sutinen. 1996. Uncertain Biomass Shift and Collapse: Implications for Harvest Policy in the Fishery. Land Economics 72:500518. Schrank, W.E., Skoda, B., Parsons, P., and N. Roy. 1995. The cost to government of maintaining a commercially unviable fishery; the case of Newfoundland 1981/82 to 1990/91. Ocean Development and International Law 23:33567. Smith, V.L. 1975. The Primitive Hunter Culture, Pleistocene Extinction, and the Rise of Agriculture. Journal of Political Economy 83:727756. Smith, T. 1994. Scaling Fisheries. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Toresen, R. and O.J. stvedt. 2000. Variation in abundance of Norwegian spring-spawning herring (Clupea harengus, Clupeidae) throughout the 20th century and the influence of climatic fluctuations. Fish and Fisheries 1:231256. Vilhjlmsson, H. 1997. Climatic Variations and Some Examples of Their Effects on the Marine Ecology of Icelandic and Greenlandic Waters, in Particular During the Present Century. Rit Fiskideildar 15(1):829. Marine Research Institute, Reykjavk. Warming, J. 1911. Om Grundrente av Fiskegrunde. Nationlakonomisk Tidskrift 499505. World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (2008) 1(2)

The historical development of fisheries in New Zealand with respect to sustainable development principles
Dr Mark T. Gibbs*
* Dr Mark T. Gibbs is Stream Leader of Aquatic Resources Monitoring and Modelling at CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Email: Mark.Gibbs=a=csiro.au (replace =a= with @)

Introduction
Over the last decade global fisheries have increasingly been under scrutiny from a range of viewpoints. The major driver of this scrutiny has been the lacklustre economic and biological performance of so many fisheries around the world ranging from small-scale artisanal fisheries such as for beche-de-mer in pacific island lagoons to major fish stocks that underpinned the economic development of whole nations. There is now clear evidence of the demise of so many fisheries (i.e. Mullon et al. 2005, Myers and Worm 2003, Hampton et al. 2005) that this chronic global problem is finally being widely recognised and addressed, albeit slowly. However, the problem as such depends on your perspective and worldview. For example from a neo-classical economic perspective the issue is typically defined in terms of the infuriatingly low economic efficiencies in many fisheries (often underpinned by subsidies that lead to excessive fleet sizes in relation to the resource base) and almost complete dissipation of rents. Often labelled as too many fishermen chasing to few fish, the dramatic overcapitalisation has often been attributed to the self-interested behaviour of individual fishermen (Clark 1985). While seemingly irrational from a social perspective, this behaviour is perfectly rational from the perspective of individual fishers or boat owners faced with an open-access resource. Under an open access regime, any fish left by boat A will be available for capture by boat B and vice versa. So, the owners of both A and B have strong incentives to capture all the fish they can, subject to the constraint that the cost of capturing the last fish does not exceed the price that can be fetched at market. Hence, under open access, rational behaviour on the part of individual boat owners leads to over-fishing by the fleet. Economists such as Gordon (1954) predicted the resulting inefficiencies that have developed.

From a regional policy perspective, over-fishing and subsequent commercial extinction of fish stocks have the potential to lead to dramatic social problems, particularly for coastal communities that developed over centuries on the back of specific fish stocks. Similarly, from a fishers perspective the collective behaviour of fishers, along with inadequate management and stewardship practices can lead to individuals being left with essentially worthless assets and little hope of passing on knowledge and seafaring culture to future generations. In addition, from an environmental advocacy perspective, industrial fishing in particular has now been shown to have the ability to reconfigure entire marine foodwebs (Pauly et al. 1998). The full effects of these practices are unknown, and may never be known, but are unlikely to be helpful in terms of the delivery of essential ecosystem goods and services. Economists have long argued that the best solution to the fishing problem has been to allocate property rights to fishers who will then have a strong incentive to look after the natural capital. Although such rights, either as ITQs (Individual Transferable Quotas), IFQs (Individual Fishing Quotas), specific area quotas, or community catch quotas have potential advantages, the establishment of such rights-based schemes has been slow. New Zealand has arguably been at the forefront of the implementation of rights-based schemes in fisheries and hence a number of researchers have followed the progress of this experiment. Since there are now a number of analyses of the performance of the ITQ regime in New Zealand (i.e. Annala 1996; Batstone and Sharp 1999, Yandle 2003; Newell and Sanchirico 2005), the emphasis here has been to take a broader look at the development of New Zealand fisheries, the majority of which took place over the last century, culminating with the establishment of the ITQ regime. A further objective is to discuss whether ITQs are a necessary and sufficient condition to achieve broad sustainability in fisheries

Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development

the historical development of fisheries in new zealand

where we define sustainability to include more than just the biological sustainability of target species. The seafood sector has been a major contributor to New Zealand export revenue over a number of decades, and the sector is presently the fourth largest export earner behind the dairy, meat and forestry sectors. New Zealands wild harvest fisheries have transformed from small-scale almost artisanal fisheries, to well-established domestic inshore fisheries, and are now sophisticated export fisheries dominated by catches of deepwater species. Similarly, much of New Zealands fledgling aquaculture sector commenced only a few decades ago with a series of government-led research projects that spawned private sector investment, initially through the entrepreneurial activities of a small number of pioneering individuals, some of whom remain as major figures in the aquaculture sector. Of interest in the New Zealand case is the fact that due to the isolated nature of the majority of wild stocks, the fate of the fisheries has been largely determined by New Zealand policies and local responses to external markets. In other words, unlike the majority of large global fisheries, the fate of the fisheries have not been strongly influenced by the direct harvesting actions of neighbouring nations (with the exception of several sporadic examples such as the early Australian-based whaling vessels, as discussed below).

Boom and bust exploitation cycles of several stocks (i.e. Tasman Bay spawning snapper aggregations, Chatham Islands crayfish). n Discovery and development of previously unfished deepwater stocks by foreign fleets prior to the establishment of the EEZ. n State subsidised development of deepwater fisheries immediately following establishment of EEZ. Over-capitalisation resulting from government incentives and subsidies, and subsequent biological sustainability issues as fishers struggle to keep vessels fishing. n Allocation and conservation conflicts between fishers and the management agency, and between the management agency and elected officials. n More recently, allocation conflicts between developing recreational fisheries and established commercial fishers, and increasing public concern over bycatch and habitat destruction issues. Of relevance here is that many, if not all of the recurrent themes identified above have occurred throughout fisheries in particularly industrialised nations. For example almost the same pattern can be seen in many fisheries in North America (Walters and Martell 2004). However, a key difference is that two of the greatest problems in global fisheries: over-capitalisation and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing practices (Gallic and Cox 2006) have largely been solved (with the main exception of poaching of abalone and rock lobster, and dumping/high grading practices driven by lack of availability of quota) in New Zealand, thanks largely to the introduction of the QMS and associated support processes (Annala 1996; Batstone and Sharp 1999; Bess 2005). Dumping and high-grading are in some ways an almost inevitable outcome of quota-managed fisheries. The most common approach to solving this is better vessel monitoring and compliance regimes, combined with more selective gear, where possible. However, these compliance operations can be labour intensive and expensive, especially in large fleets of small vessels targeting many species. In an ideal compliance world, the gear would be so selective as to catch only target species of the desired size: every animal landed on deck would be recorded and either returned alive, or processed. However, while advances particularly in on-board remote vessel monitoring technology are underway, gear selectivity remains relatively poor in many cases. Meanwhile so long as the total allowable catch remains low and quota trades somewhat limited (at least at the time

History of the development of New Zealand fisheries

Although indigenous Maori have been utilising fishery resources for many hundreds of years, commercial exploitation of fishery resources in New Zealand has largely been restricted to the last two hundred years, beginning with sealing and whaling crews often sent from Australia. Table I contains a list of key events in the history of New Zealands fisheries. This list is by no means exhaustive, but rather aims to highlight key historical events. The information contained in Table I was compiled from a number of sources although the principal reference for the history of fishing in New Zealand must be considered to be comprehensive work of Johnson and Haworth (2004). The evolution of these New Zealands wild harvest fisheries, as shown in Table I, displays a number of consistent threads, which may be summarised as follows:
n

The exploitation, and in some cases over-exploitation of accessible sedentary resources (i.e. shellfish beds) during the late 19th century.

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Table I: Summary of key dates in the development of New Zealand wild harvest fisheries
Date Pre ~ 1800 18201840 1840 18401880 1866 1877 1882 1883 Event Indigenous Maori subsistence fishing along many stretches of NZ coastline. Sporadic pakeha (a Maori term describing European settlers and their descendents) fishing and oyster harvesting (wild stocks), Maori utilising coastal finfish stocks. Treaty of Waitangi signed between Maori chiefs and pakeha representatives gives Maori a set of rights to fishery resources. Oyster trade gold rush: primarily North Island rock oysters but also Tasman Bay and Foveaux Strait beds developed. First NZ fisheries legislation gazetted (Oyster Fisheries Act 1866) in response to concerns of overfishing of oysters and to a lesser extent mussel beds. Fish Protection Act gazetted to allow for area closures arising from concerns over overfishing of several coastal fish stocks. First commercial steam trawling operations established. Refrigeration practices become widespread and first shipment of frozen NZ flounder arrives in London. A number of coastal canning operations were set up during this period for species including mullet and groper to feed newly established markets particularly in North Island coastal towns (i.e. Sanford fish market in Auckland established in 1894). Conflicts with Maori over access to coastal stocks begin to intensify. L.F. Ayson appointed NZs first Chief Inspector of Fisheries. Ayson was committed to developing fisheries in order to supply domestic consumption. Ayson played a major role in reducing exports (in order to make more domestic product available) and the widespread introduction of trawlers. Oil-engine vessels introduced into fisheries. These vessels rapidly replaced traditional oar or sail powered inshore dories and fishing vessels. First government trawling expedition with the objective of identifying and discovering new fishing grounds. A number of new local fisheries established, including Chatham Islands cod fishery. Trawling and Danish seining operations increased and put pressure on inshore stocks such as snapper. A number of domestic conflicts between fishers, processors and retailers occurred, often as a result of an influx of particularly Dalmatian fishers and merchants. However, Sea Fisheries Investigation Committee (1936) recommended further reduction in exports (and effort), and increased emphasis on distribution to ensure consistent domestic supply (total NZ catch estimated at ~18 000 t). First foreign-registered fishing vessel to fish in NZ coastal waters. A large proportion of steam powered fleet seconded to armed services. Despite dramatic fleet reduction, unlike in Europe, landings still remained high (~16 000 t p.a). Trawling re-commenced in Auckland. Port Chalmers is the largest fishing port in the South Island, principally landing inshore demersal species such as sole. Vessels still restricted to landing at port of registration and vessel size still mostly small. Trawling becomes by far the most popular method (70% of landings by 1955). Inshore fishing restrictions increase and fishers must steam further to grounds. Total landings still increasing (25 000 t by 1959). South Island Association of Federated Fisherman formed (1952). Fiordland crayfish boom resulting in a dramatic increase in catching effort as vessels from the east coast based themselves on the remote south-west coast. Secretary of Marine reported that Conservation of our fisheries resources through restrictive licensing is no longer effective. Japanese vessels began fishing close outside territorial (3 nm) limit. Total NZ landings ~26 000 t. Scott Report released and an end to restrictive licensing followed. This opened up the catching sector to newcomers and merchants/processors following removal of privileged rights of existing vessel registrations. Fishing Industry Board established and the majority of appointed members had no direct sectoral experience. Fisheries Research Division established and first large research vessel (James Cook) acquired in 1969. Tory Channel whaling station closed. Tasman Bay open access scallop fishery established.

~18001820 Sealing boom period and to a lesser extent sea-based commercial whaling (collapsed in 1840s).

1899

~1900 1907 ~1910 19201940

1933 19391944 1944

1950

1956 1961

1964

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the historical development of fisheries in new zealand

Date 1965

Event Territorial Sea and Fishing Zone Act allowed the existing 3 nm national fishing zone to be extended to 12 nm offshore. Extended zone refused to be recognized by Japanese vessels until 1970. Total New Zealand catch thought to be around 56 000 t. Sanford fishing company breaks into Japanese market although primary export market still Australia. Chatham Island crayfish boom commences and many vessels relocate from Fiordland to follow the new boom. Squid fishery developed by Japanese just outside 12 nm zone. National Development Conferences identify opportunity to significantly expand exports from fisheries resources although 1962 Export Incentive Scheme had already been offering substantial incentives to the sector. Japanese fishing immediately offshore of the 12 nm zone increases as a result of extensive Japanese fisheries research identifying new stocks. Catch from this sector thought to be ~ 130 000 t in 1971- around three times the total catch within 12 nm zone from NZ domestic fleet (43 000 t- primarily snapper at 14 000 t). Soviet trawlers develop Southern Blue Whiting fishery and Soviet and Japanese trawlers begin to extensively target hoki (Blue Grenadier). Chathams crayfish boom over as stocks heavily depleted. During the peak of the boom over 230 vessels were thought to be fishing the stock and one factory (Yovich & Hopkins) was processing up to 33 t wet weight per day. During the peak period (19661969), around 25 000 t of crayfish are thought to have been caught- over twice that caught from the extensive Fiordland coast over a longer ten-year boom period. New species fisheries began to develop in earnest (barracouta, kahawai, mackerel, pilchards, trevally, red cod), often underpinned by government tax incentives. Rapid industry development facilitated by strong central government support. Concerns over resource sustainability often quashed by strong development pressure. Hake fishery developed by Japanese (18 000 t caught in 1977). Orange Roughy discovered by NZers on Chatham Rise although Roughy had been caught by Russian vessels since late 1960s. By 1981, value of Rough fishery third in NZ behind snapper and skipjack tuna. First NZ Total Allowable Catch (TAC) set at 262 000 t for fin fish in anticipation of forthcoming EEZ determination. 95 000 t was set aside for NZ vessels, 167 000 t for foreign vessels. 200 nm Exclusive Economic Zone established. Automatic access to foreign vessels disabled and Joint Ventures (JVs) established with NZ companies such as Talleys, Sealord, Sanford, and Solander. Fletcher Fishing company established and a number of JVs were created with other traditionally non-fishing NZ companies. Tasman Bay snapper boom targeting spawning aggregations begins and ends (19771982). Wellington trawlermen campaign to control over capitalization and effort in inshore fisheries although Government strongly encourages increases in fishing effort in deepwater fleets. Snapper landings fall from 18 000 t to 12 000 t despite increased fishing effort. New Zealandisation of fisheries underway as more NZ crewed vessels enter deepwater fishery. Two-thirds of total catch now exported. Deepwater TAC set at 363 000 t (104 000 t for foreign vessels, 126 000 t for JV vessels and 110 000 t for NZ vessels). Vessels still largely allowed to fish when and where they pleased although particularly inshore fishers concerned over the biological status of stocks. The beginning of the end of the emphasis on fishery productivity and the beginning of a move towards more emphasis on biological sustainability of stocks. Tasman Bay scallop fishery closed to allow recovery. Concern that larger deepwater vessels were moving into inshore areas and catching inshore stocks. Government policy to develop deepwater fisheries thought to be often largely ignoring over-capitalisation in inshore fisheries. Fisheries Act 1983 passed and led to restructuring of fisheries management services. This led to a major attempt to remove latent effort (part-timers) from particularly inshore fisheries although Government was still supplying financial assistance and export incentives to inshore fishers under Muldoon National Government. New Labour government announced a moratorium on financial assistance to fishers. Industry and government considered approaches to reduce effort and over-capitalisation in NZ fisheries and general opinion is that decades of subsidies have encouraged fleets to become over-capitalised. Concept of establishing ITQs (Individual Transferable Quotas) floated. Value of deepwater fisheries still steadily increasing (~20% p.a). Orange Roughy contributed one-quarter of total fishery export value (1 000 t of Roughy was worth around $1M to NZ). Hoki catch increasing (35 000 t landed in NZ in 1985) and the TAC increased to 250 000 t in 1986 against recommendations by key industry stakeholders.

1966 1969

1971

1973

1975

19751976 1977 1978

1979 1980 1982

1983

1984

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the electronic journal of sustainable development www.ejsd.org Date 1986 Event Quota Management System introduced to the fishery on 1 October. Initially set as total tonnages, quota holdings were subsequently changed to a proportion of the TAC. The newly developed assets in the form of ITQ property rights are also thought to have led to change in the relationship between MAF and larger fishing companies to a more litigious relationship. First signs of social consequences of QMS- aggregation of quota and catching effort and subsequent loss of small operators. Soon nine companies will own 86% of lucrative Orange Roughy quota. First full factory trawler processes hoki at sea (Vela trawler Ottar Birting). This led to a trend in reduction of shore-based processing operations. Development of the scampi fishery underway. The Sealord deal whereby the government purchased Carter Holt fisheries assets and used the purchase to settle the Treaty of Waitangi fisheries action (the Treaty of Waitangi [Fisheries Claims] Settlement Act). Indigenous Maori in a position to purchase half of Sealord fishing, a major quota owner. Quota aggregation and consolidation of the fishing interests. By the end of this period the majority of quota had been purchased and held by a small number of large-vertically integrated companies. For example, Sanford had purchased around half its quota and Talleys around 99%, being initially allocated only around 1%. This is thought to have led to substantial increases in economic efficiency of the industry, but acted to disenfranchise many small operators and foreign catching had been substantially reduced. A lack of new quota has constrained industry growth (but capped landings and restrained fishing mortality on stocks) and large companies either investigated non-QMS species, such as scampi (Simunovich had five vessels fishing for scampi in early 1990s), or overseas investments. Sanford had three vessels fishing in Tasmania and in 1994 invested in Chilean pelagic fishing operations. Sealord invested in operations in Namibia in 1996 with the transfer of the Will Watch and Whitby. Southern Ocean Toothfish fishery developing and Sealord gained a CAMMLR (Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources) license in 1997 with others to follow soon after. High NZ dollar, increasing fuel prices and in some cases cuts to quota (i.e. hoki and other deepwater species with the major exception of squid) has resulted in lower retail and landed returns and increased catching costs. Major companies becoming less reliant upon domestic stocks and more reliant upon international operations. The decade 19952005 also saw more active participation from the recreational sector. As New Zealands economy has grown, more effort has been directed towards catching recreational stocks such as North Island snapper and blue cod in the Marlborough Sounds. Increased public scrutiny over ecosystem effects of fishing including bycatch and habitat destruction. Ministry and industry relationship remains litigious.

1987 1990 1992

19931995

19952004

20042006

the fish is being caught), dumping is likely to continue in many quota managed fisheries. It is also important to highlight that many of the biological sustainability issues generated by past fishing practices cannot simply be blamed on the greed or single minded wealth-pursuing behaviour of the fishing industry, or individual operators. For example there are a number of cases where government policy has directly led to over-capitalisation of fishing fleets, against the strongly voiced views of many fishers. Having said that, it would be wrong to blame central government alone for the over-exploitation of fisheries resources, since often decisions were based on very limited information on the catch or stock size, or information that was subsequently proved to be incorrect. Analyses of the performance of the QMS suggest that New Zealand has been able to rein in rampant over-fishing (Batstone and Sharp 1999). However, there appears to have been substantial social side-effects: as quota became aggregated, social inequality

most likely increased and many traditional Maori fishers lost their cultural connection with fishing practices (Batstone and Sharp 1999, Stewart. et al. 2006.). Does this mean that current New Zealand fishing practices have become sustainable? There are several different viewpoints on this. For example, whilst MFish (New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries) has stated that it believes that present management strategies should mostly allow those stocks below acceptable limits to rebuild (MFish 2006), prominent non-governmental organisations (NGOs; Forest and Bird, and Greenpeace, Allsopp et al. 2007) have been particularly critical of aspects of the biological management of New Zealand fisheries, including the management of the hoki fishery (under the ITQ regime) and benthic habitat destruction in deepwater fisheries in general. However, before investigating these issues, that are actually biological sustainability issues, it is worthwhile briefly clarifying definitions of sustainable development.
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the historical development of fisheries in new zealand

The Brundtland Commission defined Sustainable Development as Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (WCED, 1987). Attempts to interpret and codify these concepts have led to a rapidly expanding literature and new tools that claim to assess sustainability (e.g. triple bottom line reporting systems). However, many such approaches rapidly converge to arguments about trade-offs that lead to disappointment for environmental advocates when the economic benefits are judged to outweigh environmental costs. In some cases, advocates have sought to utilise new methods of non-market valuation of ecosystems and ecosystem goods and services in order to redirect these trade-offs in favour of their preferred environmental outcomes, although this approach has often not been well accepted. The concepts of hard (strong) and soft (weak) sustainability offer a potentially useful distinction. Weak sustainability allows for the substitution between natural and human capital sources (Pearce and Atkinson, 1992). For example, natural capital (such as a fish stock) may be reduced through harvesting and replaced by a corresponding increase in other forms of capital of at least equal value (Garcia and Staples 2000). It has been claimed that managing a fish stock under weak sustainability criteria might lead to the commercial extinction of the stock (Clark, 1985; Hilborn 2007). By contrast, hard or strong sustainability assumes that natural, social and economic capital are not interchangeable and cannot be traded off against one another. As applied to fisheries, the concept means that no stock may be reduced beyond the point in which it cannot be renewed. The concepts of Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) and equivalent biomass (Bmsy) are loosely related to strong sustainability. These have a long and contentious history (i.e. Punt and Smith 2001) and are a foundation of both the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 1995 FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. However, MSY and Bmsy have been exposed to criticism over the ethical and practical uncertainties surrounding the transfer of capital from natural to anthropogenic sources and sinks and this has hindered their utility. Even the definition of biological sustainability is open to various interpretations. For example under some definitions a stock status of below 20% unfished biomass may be regarded as endangered. In the US, the National Standard Guidelines under the Magnuson-Stevens Act state that overfishing occurs whenever a stock or stock complex is subjected to a rate or level of fishing mortality
28

that jeopardizes the capacity of a stock or stock complex to produce MSY on a continuing basis. It is theoretically possible that stocks that have been fished down to extremely low levels relative to the unfished biomass may be sustainable as long as the catch rates still allow for at least the maintenance of stock size or prevent declines to the point where the population goes extinct. It has long been argued that the point of commercial extinction occurs before population extinction and hence commercial fisheries rarely lead to the actual extinction of species. Nevertheless, allowing a stock to get to low levels relative to unfished biomass may constitute a failure of management; unless of course this was the intention. Biological sustainability in this article is defined in terms of the trajectory of the stock status. In other words, if a stock status is already low by comparison to the unfished biomass and is on trajectory leading to smaller stock sizes then this is regarded as a biologically unsustainable trajectory if allowed to continue. In a broad theoretical sense, the Brundtland definition has wide and intuitive appeal. However, as we now know, implementing sustainable development principles is not straightforward, and as recently highlighted by Beckerman (2007), definitions of sustainable development such as Brundtlands can be so vague that they become operationally useless. Furthermore, the concept of sustainable development as presently advocated is loaded with ethical conundrums, such as dealing with inter-generational equity issues that are far from resolved. There has unfortunately been a tendency to gloss over these shortfalls and move directly towards developing and implementing methodologies for assessing whether an activity is actually sustainable. However, there is a conspicuous absence of a common methodology for assessing sustainability. This is unsurprising in light of the vagueness of the concept. In fisheries management, several key meetings have been held to discuss this issue; for example the workshop on Fisheries Sustainability Indicators held in association with the World Fisheries Congress in Brisbane, Australia in 1996, and the Australian-FAO Technical Consultation on Sustainability Indicators in Marine Capture Fisheries in Sydney during January 1999. A key outcome of the FAO work has been the development of the FAO approach titled: Indicators for Sustainable Development of Marine capture Fisheries. Although there have been other methods of assessing fisheries, for example the RAPFISH approach (Pitcher and Preikshot 2001), the FAO standards encapsulate the key concepts as interpreted by the developers. To the authors knowledge, NZ fishing practices have not been formally assessed against

the electronic journal of sustainable development www.ejsd.org

these frameworks and it is beyond the scope of this work to undergo this exercise. By contrast, it is within the scope to discuss pertinent aspects of NZ fisheries that have in the past been on a biologically unsustainable trajectory, as this can be achieved without necessarily agreeing on a consensus-based definition of exactly what sustainable development is. As highlighted previously, two of the biggest issues in global fisheries are over-capitalisation and illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU fishing; Jackson et al. 2001). New Zealand had made great strides into solving both of these global issues, and has been more successful than most -- if not all governments in solving some of the issues. For example, the New Zealand approach of compulsory catch and landing reporting, in co-operation with balancing logbooks against receipts from licensed fish receivers has gone a long way in reducing IUU fishing practices, with the main exceptions being poaching of high value inshore species such as abalone (paua) and rock lobsters, and some dumping practices rumoured to occur. Similarly, the Quota Management System, introduced in 1986 largely in response to overcapitalisation issues, is generally thought to have been successful at least in slowing down over-capitalisation through output controls (Total Allowable Catch limits and Individual Transferable Quotas; Batstone and Sharp 1999). However, having said this, many of New Zealands fisheries resources were already depressed to around, and in some cases below, 20% of virgin (unfished) biomass prior to the introduction of the QMS (http://fish.govt. nz 2006). A number of fisheries in New Zealand still remain at very low stock levels by comparison to the virgin biomass, and the likelihood of these stocks ever being able to recover to unfished biomasses is often argued to be low. Hence after 20 years of ITQs, little rebuilding is evident in many stocks and in some cases stocks, such as hoki, may actually be in a worse state (MFish, 2006). We must also remember that over the past century there have been a number of conspicuous examples of biologically unsustainable fishing practices in New Zealand whereby stocks were rapidly fished down over a very short time: these could include the Chatham Islands crayfish boom in the late 1960s, some of the Orange Roughy harvesting practices, and rapid fishing down of Tasman Bay spawning snapper aggregations. The Orange Roughy fishery in particular was widely criticised as a mining operation rather than sustainable exploitation of a renewable resource even before it was discovered that the growth and reproductive rates of the stock were extremely slow by comparison to coastal

and pelagic species (Coburn et al. 1994). Similarly, the rise and fall of the rock lobster or crayfish fishery in the remote Chatham Islands off the east coast of New Zealand reads like a textbook Wild West boom and bust cycle ( Johnson and Harworth 2004). The success of the QMS in reigning in excess capacity and helping to slow down biologically unsustainable fishing practices (Annala 1996) makes a case for the effectiveness of this output controlled management regime on helping to control biological sustainability problems with individual fish stocks, despite the datahungry nature of this approach. However, there are several areas where the effectiveness of the QMS as a means for establishing and maintaining even biologically sustainable practices is less clear. The first of these areas is also ecological and involves the ecosystem effects of fishing. The QMS is inherently a single species approach to fisheries management and although allowances can be made for associated and dependent species in the setting of TACs (Total Allowable Catch) and TACCs (Total Allowable Commercial Catch), these are largely treated as externalities in the allocation processes. By contrast, proponents of ecosystems-based fisheries management (EBFM; Pikitch et al. 2004) argue that management agencies and stakeholders should be managing ecosystems, rather than simply target populations within ecosystems. Critics of EBFM on the other hand argue that managing entire ecosystems on a scientific basis is ineffective given our present lack of knowledge about particularly the behaviours of large marine subsystems (Mace 2001). If one seeks to achieve strong sustainability, any fishingrelated habitat destruction and incidental bycatch issues would have to be addressed under whatever management regime is adopted. However, this need not be the case under weak sustainability. New Zealand has tackled incidental bycatch issues (e.g. dolphin bycatch in set nets, seabird bycatch in longline fisheries and sea lion bycatch in squid fisheries) in a generally constructive manner. Nevertheless, proponents of strong sustainability continue to complain. For example, the NGO Forest and Bird has made repeated submissions to the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) that the hoki MSC sustainability certification should be renounced as a result of the issue of incidental bycatch of fur seals (submission to MSC on 16 December 2002). Since the introduction of the QMS, there has been a strong emphasis on the biological components of sustainability in New Zealand with particular regard to restricting fishery outputs to a point where stocks are around or above a best estimate of long-term sustainable
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the historical development of fisheries in new zealand

yields. However, the introduction of the QMS has led to substantial changes in the socio-economic aspects of fisheries in New Zealand (Stewart et al. 2006). There have clearly been increases in economic efficiency of fisheries associated with amalgamation of quota and vertical integration of harvesters and processors (Bess 2006); although there appear to be exceptions to this, such as the major reduction in hoki quota that occurred in 2004 (down to 100 000 t from 250 000 t in 2001). But the same changes that led to increased efficiency have also led to social upheaval and measurable changes to some traditional smaller fishing communities around New Zealand (Stewart et al. 2006 report that over 3000 fishers have exited the fishery since the introduction of the QMS). For example, many of the smaller ports around New Zealand have seen a decline, whilst larger ports such as Nelson have expanded. There has also been a substantial decline in the number of smaller owneroperator vessels. Of course, many of these social changes had to occur in order to resolve the issue of over-capitalisation in fisheries. But they could have taken place in different ways, depending on the structure of the institutional arrangements adopted. The key question to ask here is whether the objective of a fishery is to create a sustainable income stream for quota owners through increases in efficiency and more effective management controls, regardless of the impacts on the wider community, or whether it should have a broader social goal. As far as the author can determine, there is yet to be any clear investigation of how well economic benefits derived from increasing the fishery efficiency have been converted into other forms of capital. One of the major assumptions behind introducing a property rights regime is that the property rights-holders (quota owners) will have a positive incentive to take care of the resource. But as with any property rights system especially one in which rights are held in common, such as an ITQ there are imperfections. In New Zealand, the majority of quota (by tonnage) are vested in large companies, whereas a very large proportion of fish are harvested by contract fishers, who purchase Annual Catch Entitlements (ACE) from quota owners. Hence the rights-holders are generally one-step removed from the actual on-water operations. This causes classic principalagent problems: the quota owners (principals) are not able perfectly to observe the behaviour of the harvesters (agents), who are liable to inflict damage in various ways. One specific consequence of this principle-agent problem is ecological damage, such as benthic habitat destruction.
30

Another problem arises from the often strained and increasingly litigious relationship between the industry and the Ministry of Fisheries. While it takes two to tango, the Ministry has failed adequately to shift away from its command and control mentality to become a true facilitator of the implementation of the ITQ regime. Had it done so, it would have enabled better resource stewardship by rights-holders. One reason for the failure of the Ministry to change is that individual fishery managers still retain a strong sense of mistrust of industry members that was spawned long before the establishment of the ITQ scheme. This culture is also reinforced by the fact that the ITQ scheme has done little to stop some of the negative ecological side-effects of fishing. This is not surprising: it was structured to increase economic efficiency in the harvesting and management of commercial species, not to achieve broader ecological goals. In order to address some of these ecological effects, the Ministry has resorted to traditional command and control approaches, thus undermining the trust with the industry and reintroducing perverse incentive for the industry not to be good stewards.

Conclusions
In the past 100 years, the New Zealand fishing industry has grown from an almost artisan base of many small owner-operated boats to a highly economically efficient industry dominated by a few large vertically-integrated companies. These companies manage a number of contract harvesters, and process and market a range of products from intertidal shellfish to deep-water species caught using very sophisticated technology. The fishing industry has had periods where harvesting practices have clearly not adhered to the concepts of hard or strong sustainability. Particular events in this category include the Chatham Islands crayfish boom, some of the early Orange Roughy fishing practices and the fishing down of Tasman Bay spawning snapper aggregations, all of which saw stocks almost driven to commercial extinction over a handful of years. However, these instances occurred under the close management of the government department of the day, and in some cases were actually subsidised through government schemes. The establishment of the QMS in 1986 signalled a move towards a fisheries management regime that focused on increasing economic efficiency and co-incidentally went a long way towards solving many of the pressing issues that still remain in global fisheries: namely gross over-capitalisation of fleets and illegal, unregulated and

the electronic journal of sustainable development www.ejsd.org

unreported fishing activities (with the exception of some nearshore poaching, dumping and trucking- harvesting in one area and claiming to have harvested in another, infringements). The introduction of the QMS thereby sent a strong message that New Zealands fisheries were no longer a social activity, but rather were to be viewed as a wealth generating activity. Whilst the QMS may have addressed at least some of the main biological sustainability issues with targeted fish stocks, some argue that there is still some way to go towards addressing other sustainability issues, such as those associated with incidental bycatch and benthic habitat destruction. As to whether the development of the New Zealand fisheries has adhered to wider sustainable development principles: this really depends on the particular sustainability framework under consideration. For example, over the last century many of the fish stocks have been reduced to a small fraction of virgin unfished biomass, and remain in this category. According to a weak sustainability approach, this is acceptable as long as the natural capital extracted from the fish stocks have more than been compensated by an increase in economic and/or social capital. To my knowledge, this question has never been formally or adequately answered. From a strong sustainability standpoint, many observers claim that New Zealand fisheries remain unsustainable. Viz., benthic habitat destruction, incidental bycatch and appropriation of marine biological productivity to sustain fishery yields. However, there have been a range of government and industry initiatives to address these issues. Plausibly, New Zealand might even create a fisheries industry that complies with strong sustainability criteria. However, given that science is constantly finding new ways in which mankind is damaging the environment, it is questionable whether any fishing activity will ever be truly strongly sustainable. Moreover, as the fishery attempts to move towards strong sustainability, it might be less sustainable according to weak sustainability criteria, if for example less human capital were created. The establishment of rights-based schemes in New Zealand led to property rights being allocated in perpetuity and this has enabled the establishment of an effective quota market and allowed more investment security. However rights allocated in perpetuity also have the potential to restrict future options: although in theory the rights have no explicit spatial component, in reality there is an implicit spatial component to the rights which may potentially act to hinder the establishment of, for example, new marine protected areas and space

for alternative uses such as energy generation of aquaculture activities (Gibbs 2007a). Hence, despite the obvious short-term benefits of the ITQ regime in New Zealand, the medium to long-term implications are more difficult to adduce. Nevertheless, the management of these fisheries does seem to be more effective (but not perfect) at ensuring the biological sustainability of target stocks than perhaps the majority of alternative regimes presently being practiced around the world (Kaufman et al. 1999). So in that sense they do seem to be moving towards sustainability, however it is defined. Who knows, maybe one day it will even be possible to extract some direct rent from fisheries. It is equally clear, however, that ITQ regimes which explicitly manage target species are insufficient to ensure the sustainability of associated and dependent species. By definition, ITQ approaches aim to cap the harvest of quota species. There is no reason why ITQ approaches cannot be expanded to include non-target and non byproduct species although these other species for the most part lack commercial value, so there is no direct incentive for fishers to purchase quota for these associated species unless these quota substantively act to restrict the ability of fishers to harvest commercially valuable species. In such cases fishers could trade quota on, say, corals, which would then lead to the realisation of monetary value for these species that are incidental to the fishery. The major drawback to this approach is that a great deal of scientific information is required in order to set a defensible quota. In addition, the collection of such information is generally costly, especially if a large number of species or marine communities are involved and fishers often have no direct incentive to subsidise the acquisition of such information. Policing the compliance of the take or destruction of these other species has also proven to be problematical, although new on-board catch monitoring technology may alleviate this issue in the future. It therefore appears that ITQ regimes as presently practiced are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to ensure sustainable development. However, at least in the case of New Zealand, they have been a major milestone on the pathway that ultimately hopes to achieve sustainable domestic fisheries.

Acknowledgements
The unreferenced information contained in this work was gained from a number of conversations with members from the Cawthron Institute, NZ Ministry of Fisheries
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the historical development of fisheries in new zealand

and individual industry members when the author was employed at Cawthron. However, the interpretation of these views is ultimately that of the author. This work was developed from a report commissioned by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (NZ) and authored by MTG.

References
Allsopp M., R. Page, P. Johnston and D. Santillo. 2007. Oceans in Peril: Protecting Marine Biodiversity. Washington DC: Worldwatch Institute. Annala, JH. 1996. New Zealands ITQ system: have the first eight years been a success or a failure? Oceanographic Literature Review 43: 4362. Batstone, C.J. and B.M.H. Sharp. 1999. New Zealands quota management system: the first ten years. Marine Policy 23: 177190 Beckerman, W. 2007. The chimera of sustainable development The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1(1): 1726. Bess, R. 2005. Expanding New Zealands quota management system Marine Policy 29: 339347. Bess, R. 2006. New Zealand seafood firm competitiveness in export markets: The role of the quota management system and aquaculture legislation Marine Policy 4: 367378. Clark, C.W. 1985. Bioeconomic Modeling of Fisheries Management. New York: J. Wiley & Sons. Coburn, R. P., and I. J. Doonan. 1994. Orange roughy on the northeast Chatham Rise: a description of the commercial fishery, 197988 New Zealand Fisheries Technical Report No. 38. Wellington, New Zealand. Gallic, B.L. and A. Cox. 2006. An economic analysis of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing: Key drivers and possible solutions Marine Policy 30: 689695. Garcia, S.M. and D.J Staples. 2000. Sustainability reference systems and indicators for responsible marine capture fisheries: a review of concepts and elements for a set of guidelines Marine and Freshwater Research 51: 385 426. Gibbs, M.T. 2007a. Lesser-known consequences of ITQ fisheries management regimes Marine Policy 31: 112116. Gibbs, M.T. 2007b. Network governance in fisheries Marine Policy (in press) Gordon, H.S. 1954. The economic theory of a common property resource: the fishery Journal of Political Economy 62: 12442. Hampton, J., Sibert, J.R., Kleiber, P., Maunder, M.N. and S.J. Harley. 2005. Fisheries: Decline of Pacific tuna populations exaggerated? Nature, 434: E1E2. Hilborn, R. 2007. Defining success in fisheries and conflicts in objectives Marine Policy 31(2): 153158.

Jackson, J.B.C., Kirby M.X., Berger W.H., Bjorndal K.A., Botsford L.W., Bourque, B.J., Bradbury, R.H., Cooke. R., Erlandson, J., Estes, J.A., Hughes, T.P., Kidwell, S., Lange, C.B., Lenihan, H.S., Pandolfi, J.M., Peterson, C.H., Steneck, R.S., Tegner, M.J. and RR. Warner. 2001. Historical overfishing and the recent collapse of coastal ecosystems. Science 293: 629-630. Johnson, D. and J. Harworth. 2004. Hooked: the story of the New Zealand fishing industry. Wellington: Hazard Press. Kaufmann, B., Geen, G. and S. Sen. 1999. Fish Futures: Individual Transferable Quotas in Fisheries, Fisheries Research and Development Corporation and Fisheries Economics, Research and Management, Kiama, New South Wales. Mace, P.M. 2001. A new role for MSY in single-species and ecosystem approaches to fisheries stock assessment and management Fish and Fisheries 2: 232. MFish. 2006. The State of our Fisheries Ministry of Fisheries New Zealand 48pp. New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries, Wellington New Zealand Mullon, C., P. Freon, and P. Cury. 2005. The dynamics of collapse in world fisheries Fish and Fisheries 6: 111120. Myers, R.A and B. Worm. 2003. Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities Nature 423(6937): 280283. Newell, R.G. and J.N. Sanchirico. 2005. Fishing quota markets Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 49(3): 437462. Pauly D, Chistensen, V., Dalsgaard, J., Froese, R. and F. Torres. 1998. Fishing down marine food webs Science 279: 860863. Pearce, D. W. and G. Atkinson. 1992. Are National Economies Sustainable, London: Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, CSERGE Working Paper GEC 9211 Pikitch E.K., Santora, C., Babcock, E.A., Bakun, A., Bonfil, R., Conover, D.O., Dayton, P., Doukakis, P., Fluharty, D., Heneman, B., Houde, E.D., Link, J., Livingston, P.A., Mangel, M., McAllister, M.K., Pope, J. and K. Sainsbury. 2004. Ecosystem-based fishery management Science 305: 346-366. Pitcher T.J. and D. Preikshot, 2001. RAPFISH: a rapid appraisal technique to evaluate the sustainability status of fisheries Fisheries Research 49: 255270. Punt, A.E. and A.D.M. Smith. 2001. The gospel of Maximum Sustainable Yield in fisheries management: birth, crucifixion and reincarnation. In: Conservation of Exploited Species, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, J., Walshe, K. and B. Moodie. 2006. The demise of the small fisher? A profile of exiters from the New Zealand fishery Marine Policy 30: 328340. Walters, C.J. and S.J.D. Martell. 2004. Fisheries Ecology and Management. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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WCED. 1987. Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yandle, T. 2003. The challenge of building successful stakeholder organizations: New Zealands experience in developing a fisheries co-management regime Marine Policy 27: 179192

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The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (2008) 1(2)

Icelands ITQ system creates new wealth

Ragnar Arnason*
*Ragnar Arnason is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Iceland. Email: ragnara=a=hi.is (replace =a= with @)

Introduction
Many commercial fish stocks are potentially highly valuable. Empirical studies indicate that on average they may be able to generate net economic benefits or profits amounting to some 50% of the value of landings (FAO 1992, Newton and Garcia 1997, Arnason et al. 2004). This is comparable to the net profits obtainable from fairly typical oil reserves. An added bonus is that fish stocks are renewable, so profits from fisheries can be sustained indefinitely. On a global level, the attainable, sustainable profits from global fisheries have been estimated to amount to some US$50 billion per year (FAO 1992, Arnason 2006). The problem is that because of an inappropriate institutional structure, namely lacking private property rights in the fishery customarily referred to as the common property1 (or common pool) arrangement, the potential profits of fisheries are often not realized. Under the common property arrangement, fishermen are effectively forced to engage in wasteful competition with each other for shares in the obtainable catch. The waste manifests itself as excessive fishing capital, excessive fishing effort and depressed stocks of fish. Fishermen suffer low and decreasing incomes (Gordon 1954). The general population suffers rising fish prices, and environmental degradation. For governments, it is a source of seemingly endless trouble. One result is that, with a few exceptions, the worlds fisheries are not making a profit. If anything, they are losing a great deal of money and can only continue to exist through public subsidies (Garcia and Newton 1997). The economic waste in global fisheries, in the form of lost profits, probably amounts to about US$50 billion annually (Arnason 2006). This unnecessary waste is just under the total amount given in development aid world-wide (Addison et al. 2005). It should be emphasized that the problem is manmade. It stems from a particular social arrangement stipulating that everyone, at least everyone belonging

to a defined group, can harvest from the fish stocks. The obvious remedy, therefore, is to replace this social arrangement with one stipulating that only those with well-defined harvesting rights can fish. These rights, obviously, amount to private property rights which have been well-established as being efficient in other areas of economic production (Smith 1776, Demsetz 1967, Arnason 2000). There are several possible types of private property rights in fisheries, of which individual transferable quotas (ITQs) are the most common. Under the ITQ system, the basic property right held by individuals is a right to harvest. These harvesting rights are defined as shares in the total allowable catch (TAC). The TAC is set by the fisheries authorities or the fishermen themselves for each fishing season. Once the TAC has been set, the harvesting shares, or quota shares as they are often called, define the annual quota, i.e., the amount of harvest each fisher may take during fishing season. In a well designed ITQ system, both quota shares and annual quotas are perfectly divisible and tradable. Thus, if otherwise properly specified, i.e. permanent and secure and appropriately enforced, ITQs constitute high quality private property rights in harvesting. Since the harvesting is a major determinant of the size of the fish stocks, ITQs also constitute certain, albeit limited, form of property rights in the fish stocks. So, ITQs go a substantial way toward eliminating the common property problem in fisheries. As a result, ITQmanaged fisheries are generally found to be much more economically efficient than the traditional common property arrangement (Arnason 2001). This increased efficiency has been found to derive (in proportions which depend on the initial position of each fishery) from (i) reduced fishing effort, (ii) reduced fishing capital, (iii) larger fish stocks, (iv) higher quality of landed catch and (v) better co-ordination between supply of landings and market demand. These outcomes are seen virtually everywhere that ITQs have been introduced, as shown in study after study (e.g. Shotton 2000 and references therein, Arnason 2001, Homans and Wilen 2003).

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icelands itq system creates new wealth

ITQs generally become valuable in the market place, often very valuable. This represents new wealth because, prior to the introduction of the ITQs, the fisheries typically generated no, or negligible, net profits. Moreover, to the extent that the ITQs are sufficiently secure and long lasting, they are bankable, i.e. they may be used as collateral to obtain financial capital. Thus, by virtue of the ITQ system, zero-value fisheries are turned into fisheries with a positive value. This represents the first step of wealth creation. On the basis of the property rights embedded in the ITQs, and their transferability, this new wealth is turned into living capital in the sense defined by de Soto (de Soto 2003). The newly created wealth in the fisheries can be used to raise more capital and, thus can act as a springboard to a higher path of economic growth. This represents the second stage of wealth creation. Iceland, a moderately large fishing nation, was one of the first to adopt the ITQ system in its fisheries. Therefore, considerable experience of the systems impact along the dimensions discussed above has been accumulated. Clearly, reviewing Icelands experience is of considerable interest, and is the purpose of this paper. In particular, the paper seeks to assess the extent of wealth creation within the ITQ system, and how that wealth may have propagated throughout the Icelandic economy. It turns out that the new wealth created by the ITQ system in the fisheries themselves (the first stage) is quite substantial relative to the national capital and the GDP of Iceland. Therefore, the economic growth effects (the second stage of wealth creation) might be expected to be correspondingly large. Indeed, the introduction of the ITQ system (in a fairly complete form) was followed by a substantial spurt in economic growth, the longest such period in Icelands modern history. Although this economic growth primarily occurred in sectors of the economy other than the fisheries sector, most importantly

the financial services sector, there is evidence that it was significantly assisted by the wealth initially generated by the ITQ system.

I. The introduction and evolution of the Icelandic ITQ system

Iceland is one of the most fisheries-dependent nations in the world. In recent years catches have amounted to about 1.7 million metric tonnes annually, some 2% of the global marine harvest. About 40% of export earnings have been generated by fish products. The fishing industry has directly accounted for over 10% of the gross domestic product and, according to a recent estimate, directly and indirectly for up to 25% (Agnarsson and Arnason 2007). Prior to the introduction of its ITQ system, Iceland experimented with a wide range of alternative fisheries management systems. These included access licenses, fishing effort restrictions, investment controls and vessel buy-back programs, all of which were found to be unsatisfactory. The earliest ITQ systems were initiated in a few comparatively unimportant fisheries during the latter half of the 1970s, following the extension of the fisheries jurisdiction to 200 miles. Since then, the ITQ system has been extended in several steps and now comprises practically all Icelandic fisheries. The most important steps in this evolution were taken in 1984, 1991 and 2004. In 1984, a limited form of ITQs was introduced in the demersal fisheries, which are by far Icelands most important fisheries. In 1991, a uniform and fairly complete ITQ system was adopted in all Icelandic fisheries, applying to all vessels above a certain minimum size. In 2004, the system was expanded to cover all commercial fishing vessels. The chronology of the development in Icelandic fisheries management is summarized in Table 1.

Table 1: Key steps in the evolution of the Icelandic ITQ system a chronological overview
1976 1979 1980 1984 1985 1986 1991 2004 The herring fishery: Individual vessel quotas introduced The herring fishery: Vessel quotas made transferable The capelin fishery: Individual vessel quotas introduced The demersal fisheries: Individual transferable vessel quotas introduced for larger fishing vessels. Small vessels (under 10 GRT (gross registered tonnes)) exempted The demersal fisheries: An option to adopt effort restriction instead of quota restriction introduced The capelin fishery: Vessel quotas made transferable A fairly complete, uniform ITQ system adopted for all fisheries. Small vessels (under 6 GRT) exemption retained. Small vessels incorporated in the ITQ system

Source: Ministry of Fisheries: Fisheries laws and regulations

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Note that before 1991, the ITQ systems in place were limited both in terms of fisheries and fleet coverage, and in the quality of the property rights they defined. Several fisheries and fishing fleet classes were not covered by the ITQ system. The continuation of the ITQ system was uncertain and long term transfers of quota rights were problematic. As a result, quota-holdings were generally not accepted as collateral by financial institutions. All this changed in 1991. The system was formally established as the permanent cornerstone of Icelandic fisheries management. Its coverage was greatly increased, and its legal and property rights attributes were clarified and strengthened. Thus, in spite of the small vessel exemption (abolished in 2004), from 1991 onwards a high quality ITQ system may be said to have applied in the Icelandic fisheries. However, the system is still some distance from establishing perfect harvesting property rights. Most importantly, there is a certain uncertainty about the systems permanence. Also, quotas are subject to special taxation, which reduces the value of the property right.

II. Value of quotas

The Icelandic ITQ system comprises two basic assets: (i) the permanent quota share, i.e., the share in current and future TACs held by the quota owner, and (ii) the annual quota, i.e., the permitted annual catch, defined as the multiple of the TAC and the quota share. Both assets are transferable. Therefore, not surprisingly, a market for

trading these quotas has spontaneously arisen. In this market, both types of quota assets are intensively traded and equilibrium prices established. The quota shares are much like a share in a limited company. Their market price reflects the present value of expected profits from holding these shares (Arnason 1990). Since the market is quite efficient and quota traders are risking their own money, the share quota price is almost certainly the best available predictor of future profitability and, hence, the true economic value of the Icelandic fisheries. At the same time, due to the nature of the ITQs as marketable property rights, this quota value reflects the value of the ITQ asset. Since 1984, an increasing number of fisheries have been included in the Icelandic ITQ system. Currently, the system comprises about 35 different fisheries. The overall quota value of the Icelandic fisheries is the sum of the quota values in each of these fisheries. The evolution of this quota value since 1984 is illustrated in Figure 1. As can be seen in Figure 1, quota- or ITQ-values of the Icelandic fisheries have risen quite dramatically since 1984. Especially big percentage jumps occurred in 19901 and 19957 following strengthenings in the property rights quality of the quotas. In 1984, the ITQ-value was about US$25 million. Since 1998, it has hovered between US$3.5 and 4.5 billion. The significance of these ITQ-values for the Icelandic economy is better appreciated when compared to other important measures of the economy. Figure 2 depicts the ITQ-values as fractions of (a) Icelands GDP and (b)

Figure 1 Permanent quota values in Iceland: estimates M, US$

5,000

4,000

3,000

2,000

1,000

1984

1986

1988

1990

1992

1994

1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

Source: quota market prices and TACs

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icelands itq system creates new wealth

Figure 2 Permanent quota values in Iceland as fractions of GDP and total capital: estimates
0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.0

Fraction of GDP Fraction of total capital

1984

1986

1988

1990

1992

1994

1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

Source: Statistics Iceland and permanent quota values in Figure 1

total national capital as it is conventionally measured (i.e. the market value of physical capital). Figure 2 shows that since 1991 the ITQ-values have constituted a very substantial fraction of both Icelands GDP and its total capital base. This has been especially pronounced from 1994 onwards. Thus, between 1997 and 2002 ITQ values amounted to over 40% of the annual GDP and up to 20% of national capital. Since 2002, these percentages have declined somewhat. This, however, is not because of a decline in the quota values (as made clear by Figure 1), but because other sectors of the Icelandic economy have expanded even faster. From the perspective of this paper, however, the key point is not that ITQ-values have increased and now constitute a very substantial fraction of traditional macro-economic measures. The crucial point is that these ITQ-values represent new wealth that did not exist before. Of course, the underlying natural resource existed before the ITQs. But, because of an inefficient institutional structure, i.e., the common property arrangement, it yielded little or no net economic benefits. ITQs changed this situation in two ways. First, they led to a rationalization of the fisheries; they reduced fishing effort and fishing fleets, increased fish stocks and improved co-ordination between supply and demand of catches, which greatly increased the net economic benefits flowing from the fisheries. Second, the ITQs created marketable assets which turned out to be valuable in the market. In other words, the value of the fishery gained a market representation. The property
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rights content of the ITQs was of course responsible for both impacts. Even more important is the fact that ITQ-wealth is living capital (de Soto 2003). It can be used as a foundation to raise financial capital and thus contribute to other spheres of economic activity. This has, in fact, taken place to a great extent in Iceland. One way to see this is to observe that most of the original quota shares have changed hands, often more than once. Thus, many of the initial and subsequent recipients of share quotas have realized their gain in value by selling them and moving the equivalent financial capital out of the fishery and into new industries. Another way to substantiate this secondary capital generation of the ITQ system is to note that in spite of much improved profits and reduced fishing fleets, the level of indebtedness in the Icelandic fishing industry has increased substantially. Thus, between 1997 and 2007, this indebtedness more than doubled. This shows that, with the help of the financial system, ITQs have been used to generate financial capital to be used in other industries.

III. Impact on economic growth

Since the establishment of perfectly transferable, durable ITQ property rights in 1991, the Icelandic economy has experienced a prolonged period of high economic growth. Annual growth rates from 1985 to 2006 are illustrated in Figure 3.

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During the 15-year period from 1991 to 2006, real economic growth in Iceland has averaged 3.8%. This far exceeds average European Union (EU-15) growth rates as well as those of the UK during the same period, which were respectively 2.0 and 2.4%. From 1994, when ITQvalues increased dramatically, Icelands economic growth increased still further. The average growth rate was 4.6% per annum, while the corresponding figures for the EU and Britain are 2.3 and 3.0%, respectively. The period since 1994 has also been longest period of sustained economic growth in Icelands modern economic history. These high economic growth rates cannot be explained by Iceland starting with a low per capita income. Iceland ranked 8th in the world in terms of per capita income in 1994, and 5th in 2005 (UNDP 2007). This record does not of course prove the existence of a causal relationship between the wealth generated by the ITQ system and economic growth in Iceland. The circumstantial evidence, however, is quite suggestive. First, economic theory on the market economy and sources of economic growth predict an effect of this nature. Second, the correlations in timing and extent are strong. Thus, a simple correlation between real ITQ-values and real GDP is very high (over 0.9), especially in the period up to 2001, when the other sectors of the economy really started to take off. A simple regression analysis suggests a similar explanatory power. Third, alterations in the structure of the economy, especially the great expansion of certain new sectors of the economy (particularly that of financial intermediation) strongly indicate that

the increased availability of financial capital, which the ITQ-system was instrumental in creating, has much to do with the recent high rates of economic growth. Of course, the ITQ system was not the only driver of this comparatively high rate of economic growth in Iceland over the past 13 years. Large scale privatizations and general liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s and subsequent reductions of corporate taxation probably also played an important role in the process. However, to the extent that the growth was fuelled by new investments, a substantial part of the financial capital derived from the new wealth represented by ITQs. An important component of economic growth in Iceland during the past 10 years has been the dramatic expansion of the countrys financial sector. This sector, which consists primarily of banks and investment companies, expanded from less than 1% of GDP in the early 1990s to about 8% in 2006. Thus, it is directly accountable for a substantial portion of the economic growth during the period. In a recent publication by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce, Portes and Baldursson (2007) attempt to provide an explanation for this expansion. In a section titled Where does the money come from? they claim that the equity used to sustain this expansion originally came from two sources: (i) privatization of the previously state-owned Icelandic banks in the early 1990s, and (ii) the new wealth created in the fisheries though the ITQ-system.

Figure 3 Real GDP growth rates in Iceland %, 19852006

12 10 8 6 4 2 0 2 4 6 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005

Source: Statistics Iceland

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icelands itq system creates new wealth

Conclusions
Icelandic ITQs have become very valuable compared to other measures of the Icelandic economy. This value predominantly represents new wealth for the Icelandic economy. Before the introduction of the ITQ-system, the profitability of the fisheries was poor. Even more importantly, future profits of the fishery could not be captured in a marketable asset. The evidence strongly indicates that the new capital embedded in ITQs has, via financial intermediation, been multiplied and found its way into other industries. Many of these industries have been extremely successful, thus greatly adding to the initial economic impact of ITQs on the fisheries themselves. The new wealth embedded in the ITQs was created by the relatively simple expedient of defining private property rights in the extraction from common pool fish stocks. In other words, the introduction of the ITQ system constituted a certain, albeit limited, shift from collective to private ownership in fish resources. By creating a new form of capital, the ITQ-system in Iceland has greatly increased marketable wealth and, thus, seems to have contributed substantially to the countrys rapid economic growth.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two anonymous referees and the editors of this journal for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

References
Addison, T., G. Mavrotas and M. McGillivray. 2005. Development Assistance and Development Finance. Wider Research Paper no. 2005/33. UNU-Wider. United Nations University. Agnarsson, S. and R. Arnason. 2007. The Role of the Fishing Industry in the Icelandic Economy. In T. Bjorndal, D.V. Gordon, R. Arnason and U.R. Sumaila (eds.). Advances in Fisheries Economics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Arnason, R., L. Sandal, S. Steinshamn and N. Vestergaard. 2004. Optimal Feedback Controls: Comparative Evaluations of the Cod Fisheries of Denmark, Iceland and Norway. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 86, 2:53142. Arnason, R. 1990. Minimum Information Management in Fisheries. Canadian Journal of Economics 23(3):63053. Arnason, R. 2000. Property Rights as a Means of Economic Organization. In R. Shotton (ed.) Use of Property Rights in Fisheries Management. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 401/1. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Arnason, R. 2001. A review of international experiences with ITQs. CEMARE. Report 59. Portsmouth: University of Portsmouth. Arnason, R. 2006. Estimation of Global Rent Loss in Fisheries: Theoretical Basis and Practical Considerations. In P. Shriver (ed.) IIFET 2006 Proceedings. Ciriacy-Wantrup, S.V. and R.C. Bishop. 1975. Common Property as Concept in Natural Resource Policy. Natural Resources Journal 15:71327. Demsetz, H. 1967. Toward a Theory of Property Rights. American Economic Review 57:34759. Eggertsson, Th. 1990. Economic Behavior and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. FAO. 1992. Marine Fisheries and the Law of the Sea A Decade of Change. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Gordon, H.S. 1954. Economic Theory of a Common Property Resource: The Fishery. Journal of Political Economy 62(2):12442 Garcia, S.M and C. Newton. 1997. Current Situation, trends and prospects in World Capture Fisheries. In E.K. Pikitch, D.D. Huppert and M. P. Sissenwine (eds.) Global Trends: Fisheries Management. American Fisheries Society, pp. 327.

Notes
1. In this paper, common property refers to a resource to which a group of people hold utilization rights and possibly other rights. The group must contain at least two persons but it can be much larger: it may, for instance, include all people living in a certain area, all nationals, or even the global population. In many cases it is useful to talk about the common property of some given group, e.g. the common property of all village inhabitants. The common property rights may be weak or strong. This definition of common property is in accordance with classical one as forwarded by e.g. Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop (1975) and Eggertsson (1990). It includes open access, the so-called common pool resources (Ostrom 1990) and community held resources as special cases. It is useful to define common property this widely (see Ostrom 1990 for a narrower definition) as all common property resources that fall under this definition are subject to the well-known common property problem (Gordon 1954, Demsetz 1967, Hardin 1968, CyriacyWantrup and Bishop 1975). The antonym to common property is private property, under which the common property problem does not arise, although other problems of resource utilization may.

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Hardin, G. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162:124347 Homans, F.R. and J.E. Wilen. 2003. Markets and rent dissipation in regulated open access fisheries. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 49:381404. Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Actions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Portes, R. and F.M. Baldursson. 2007. The Internationalization of Icelands Financial Sector. Icelandic Chamber of Commerce. Reykjavik. Smith, A. 1776 [1981]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. R.H. Cambell and A.J. Skinner (eds.). Indianapolis US: Liberty Fund.

Shotton R. 2000. (ed.) Use of Property Rights in Fisheries Management. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 404/1 & 2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. De Soto, H. 2000. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books. Statistics Iceland. 2007. http://www.statice.is/. Reykjavik: Statistics Iceland. UNDP. 2007. Human Development Report 2007/8. New York: United Nations.

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The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (2008) 1(2)

Book review

Climate change, justice and future generations

By Edward A. Page
Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, England, 2006

Review by Wilfred Beckerman

Wilfred Beckerman is an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford University, England, and an Honorary Visiting Professor of Economics at University College London. Email: wilfred.beckerman =a= economics.oxford.ac.uk (replace =a= with @)

It would be hard to be objective about a book that contains three references to me in the bibliography but misspells my name each time were it not for the fact that I have been guilty of a similar offence myself. Anyway, it is not difficult to find a lot of merit in Pages book. First, it tackles an increasingly important issue in a very logical and well-structured manner. This issue is the growing long-run threat to the welfare of future generations posed by climate change. Clearly, apart from the scientific uncertainty surrounding this threat, policy reaction ought to take account of the ethical problem of how much sacrifice the present generation ought to make in order to mitigate the damage that climate change might do in the future. This ethical problem might appear to be a problem in intergenerational justice. A balanced assessment of the policy choices, therefore, requires both some understanding of the likely effects of climate change and their relationship to alternative theories of intergenerational justice. Pages book is one of the first to try to do just that. The book begins with a broad-brush statement of the problem, and this is followed in chapter 2 by a summary of what is the consensus view of the science of climate change. Not being a scientist or a member of the British royal family I am not qualified to comment on the science of climate change, so I shall restrict my comments to Pages presentation of the ethical dilemmas posed if we accept the general consensus. At an early stage in the book Page sets out his stall by making the controversial statement that for simplicity, ethics, equity and justice will be treated as interchangeable concepts. He then goes on to narrow down the scope of his inquiry by concentrating on distributive justice. In chapter 3, he sets out what some readers will find a very useful survey of the main candidates for what

many commentators call the focal variable in theories of equality i.e. what it is one wants equality of - such as welfare, resources, opportunities for welfare, and capabilities, as well as Rawlss well-known maximin proposal, and discusses the way that each theory impinges on the likely consequences of climate change. Chapter 4 continues the good work by introducing some theories of distributive justice that are not strictlyspeaking egalitarian. These include utilitarianism (which is, of course, not really concerned with equality at all except at an instrumental level as a means of maximising total utility), and prioritarianism (associated chiefly with Derek Parfit and Roger Crisp). And again, he poses the interesting question of what the implications of each theory as well as of simple egalitarianism would be for the policies that ought to be adopted to deal with climate change, taking account of the different time-profile of welfare for each generation that different policies will produce. He highlights the different implications with the aid of carefully constructed numerical examples, which many readers may find very useful, although, in the end, they seem just to lead to the trivially obvious conclusion that utilitarians would follow the path that maximised utility over generations, prioritarians would follow the path that maximised the welfare of the worst off, and egalitarians would prefer the path that led to the greatest equality of welfare between generations. This is followed by a discussion of the sufficiency view of distributive justice, of which Harry Frankfurt has been a leading exponent. One of the crucial problems in any theory of intergenerational justice is what is known as the non-identity problem. This is basically that since climate change will affect the precise identity of the people actually alive in the future it cannot be said that any actual individuals

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have been harmed by it, since, in the absence of climate change, different people would have been alive in the future. In other words, nobody alive in the future can say that his welfare has been reduced as a result of climate change since if there had been no climate change he would not have existed. Conversely, if climate change is significantly mitigated our successors could not have claimed that they are better off than they would have been had climate change been allowed to take place, since in that event they would not have been born. Page goes on to show how this view enters into the choice between different forms of Kyoto-type international agreements to mitigate climate change. But perhaps he ought to have discussed how it all turns on the crucial and highly controversial person-affecting claim (which Temkin calls The Slogan), which, roughly speaking, is that no harm is done unless some actual person is harmed. In the same chapter Page does rightly recognise the important role in the whole story played by the question of whether future generations can be said to have rights. And, again, he puts empirical flesh on the otherwise purely abstract philosophical problem by reference to predictions about the effects of climate change on inhabitants of some Pacific Islands. He shows a laudable scepticism (page 155) of how far future generations can be said to possess rights, and rightly challenges Edith Brown Weisss pathetic defence of the notion that they can, which consists really of just inventing a name for them (group-rights as distinct from individual rights, or planetary rights) as if dreaming up new names makes sense of attributing characteristics and properties such as having rights, or blond hair, or a taste for cream cheese to non-existent entities.

All in all, therefore, many readers will find the book a very useful run over the main theories of distributive justice and their different relationship to the choice of policies to deal with climate change. Presumably, space limitations prevented the author from discussing more fully the main features that any theory of justice should exhibit and, in particular, how far they conform to Rawlss acceptance of the Humean circumstances of justice, which rule out inter-generational justice from the outset. Also, Rawlss repeated insistence on justice as a feature of institutions and societies that determine everybodys rights and obligations makes it difficult to maintain that inter-generational justice can be invoked at all insofar as future generations (non-overlapping) cannot logically speaking have any rights. But to develop these themes might mean that I was letting myself be influenced by the authors failure to spell my name correctly.

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The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (2008) 1(2)

Book review

The Bottom Billion

By Paul Collier
Oxford University Press, USA, 2007

Review by Karol Boudreaux

Karol Boudreaux is Senior Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Email: kboudrea =a= gmu.edu (replace =a= with @)

I recently visited a company based just outside Kigali, Rwanda called Gahaya Links. The company, started by a Rwandan single mom named Janet Nkubana, sells beautifully handcrafted baskets for the US market. Janet started her business in the mid-90s, after the genocide. She recognized that ex-pat staffers working for NGOs in Rwanda wanted souvenirs. She also realized that a large number of very poor women, many of whom were widows, needed work. Janet bet that if she could get the women to weave good baskets, she could sell them. The rest, so the saying goes, is history. By 1997 Janet was selling the baskets at flea markets in the US. In 2002, after the US African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) was passed, she registered her business as an export company and began to send baskets duty-free to the US. In 2004 she was sponsored by US AID to show her wares at a major conference in the US. She received funding from the US African Development Foundation for capacity building and today she works with over 4,000 women who produce baskets for sale in America. Her major client is the large US retail chain Macys. Janets story is impressive for several reasons: first, she has built a strong business that is competing well in the global market a tough accomplishment for anyone. Next, she did this in post-conflict, landlocked Rwanda, a country decimated by the genocide of 1994. She has managed to find good partners, in both the private sector and the public sector, and with these partners has built a business that provides several thousands of women with better income, more skills, and a sense of community. In his latest book, The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier (a professor of economics at Oxford University) pays little attention to people like Janet the entrepreneurs working in Africa and elsewhere who are creating wealth for their fellow citizens. Indeed, the sense one has reading

The Bottom Billion is that Janets do not, or should not, exist in countries like Rwanda: countries burdened by one or more development traps. Such relatively smallscale, micro-level efforts to build sustainable businesses are not a part of Colliers story; instead, he constructs a theory of why poverty persists in some places and not in others. His building blocks come from a body of work done with a host of co-authors over the past decade. And while a great deal of what Collier suggests is extremely sensible, there is room for some disagreement. The book focuses on those 58 countries, most of which are in Africa, where much of the population still lives in absolute poverty: these are the bottom billion and, Collier says, wed best pay attention to their needs for at least two reasons: one, because its the right thing to do and, two, because if we ignore them they are likely to create serious problems for the rest of us in the future. Collier stakes his ground somewhere between the peripatetic Jeffrey Sachs, who calls for a big push to double official development assistance and end poverty and NYU economist William Easterly, who is deeply skeptical of the aid business and who argues that empowering seekers rather than planners is the better strategy for ending poverty. Like Easterly, Collier speaks as an insider who recognizes many of the problems associated with the aid business (he was previously director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank), but unlike Easterly, he argues that aid sometimes substantial amounts of it will be absolutely necessary to help these poorest of countries avoid sliding further behind the developed world. But Collier is not a throw money at the problem economist. He has studied circumstances in which aid seems to work and circumstances in which it is harmful. The result is a nuanced approach to development assistance. He notes that ex-post aid (such as the

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USs Millennium Challenge Account) does give countries positive incentives to reform policies. His research also shows that providing large amounts of aid to a new leader or at the beginning of a reform process might actually create disincentives to carry through much-needed policy changes. The go slow approach he advocates is counter-intuitive but sensible. Another of Colliers interesting suggestions is to funnel more aid through independent service authorities, some of whom might be NGOs, churches, or other private firms. There would, he argues, need to be oversight of such authorities as well as meaningful accountability, but the idea of shifting more services such as health care, utilities, and education away from the public sector in countries that lack capacity is a good one. It would create much-needed employment opportunities in the private sector and, as the work of James Tooley and Pauline Dixon shows, such independent service providers deliver. To take just one example, private education entrepreneurs are effectively meeting the needs of very poor students in Nigeria, Kenya, and India. On the down side, though, Colliers suggestion that the bottom billion would be well served by greater reliance on a series of international charters, some of which would be administered by international organizations, is debatable. While some private-sector led initiatives, such as De Beers Kimberley Process, or the Extractive Industries Initiatives provide encouraging experiments in developing best practices, this does not mean that a new Charter on Budget Transparency or on Natural Resource Conflict which would need to be signed and adhered to by sovereign states would fare better than the current crop of UN-based charters. Collier fails to make the case that international organizations would be better at implementing his suggested charters than they have been at implementing existing international laws.

A final concern is Colliers claim that it might simply be too late for the bottom billion to enter into the global marketplace. Collier suggests that competing against China and India will be well-nigh impossible for many of these landlocked, poorly governed, postconflict countries. No doubt these are serious disabilities and, there is no doubt that China and India are serious competitors, but presumably the principle of comparative advantage continues to apply: as the Chinese and Indians specialize, each of the bottom billion will be able to specialize in tasks that they perform comparatively well (think about Janets baskets). Through specialization and exchange the bottom billion do have hope of a better future. Paul Collier makes a strong case that the worlds bottom billion poorest people face unique challenges that call for strategic development assistance, but ultimately, what the bottom billion really need are more Janet Nkubanas.

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The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (2008) 1(2)

Book review

Democratizing technology: risk, responsibility & the regulation of chemicals

By Anne Chapman
Earthscan, London, England, 2007

Review by Bill Durodi

Dr Bill Durodi is Associate Fellow of the International Security Programme at The Royal Institute of International Affairs, ChathamHouse, London. Email: bdurodie =a= chathamhouse.org.uk (replace =a= with @)

Our Stolen Future convinced me that we should be much more worried about synthetic chemicals than we generally are. With these words from the preface to her first book, Democratizing Technology, environmental campaigner and now author, Anne Chapman, inadvertently reveals that one of the main, supposed conclusions of her work pre-dates her actual research. Chapman was driven by the ideas of the controversial 1996 book by Theo Colborn and her collaborators Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers which suggested that artificial hormones were having dramatic effects on wildlife, the environment and humanity itself. When she came to doing a PhD years later, she felt that the way in which synthetic chemicals were treated was part of the problem and that too little had been done to regulate them (p.vii). This book is the result. A serious reader, pushed for time, could stop reading at this point, as indeed I almost did at the end of that preface. Not because her work bears the usual hallmarks of a book based on a PhD a number of ponderous, pedantic and overly-abstract chapters on themes tangential to the main subject but because, like many other purportedly disinterested activists working in this field, Chapman reveals from the outset how she started with a conclusion and then went in search of the data to confirm it. In fact, judging by her description of the weight of evidence as being the evidence from different, independent sources, which, though none individually is necessarily conclusive, may together form a convincing case (p.74/5), data may be too generous a term here. Clearly, from her perspective, evidence is the plural of anecdote. Never mind that humans ingest doses of hormones

millions of times greater in their food than through exposure to, what Chapman tactically and pejoratively labels as, synthetic chemicals, nor indeed, that by choosing to use oral contraceptives or hormone replacement therapies, many expose themselves even more. Chapmans mission, judging by the limited variety of works she references, has no room for contrary evidence or research. She is, in this regards, in what she might consider to be excellent company. It was precisely such a cavalier and pseudo-scientific approach to evidence by Colborn and her collaborators that led Professor Michael Kamrin of Michigan State University in his review of Our Stolen Future for the journal Scientific American to note that the book was not scientific in the most fundamental sense, arguing that the authors present a very selective segment of the data that has been gathered about chemicals that might affect hormonal functions, and further that it obscures the line between science and policy to the detriment of both. Despite these criticisms, Chapman hits an easy target by identifying UK policy on science and technology as being too instrumental and narrowly focused on economic outcomes. But, far from celebrating the human spirit to innovate, her real concern is that technology might change social relations, leaving people with little choice as to whether to adopt it or not. In this regards, much like the editors of the Science in Society Series within which her publication appears, she seems to assume that technical aspects dominate human ones. But, there is plenty of evidence that it is social change that enables technological development, as much as the other way round. Hence too, in our pessimistic age, society

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may be having more of a negative impact on science than vice-versa. Technology should produce and consist of durable things (p.29) she incants. But not too durable maybe, lest these be considered persistent, that bogeyman of chemical substance types she rails against later on in the book. In fact, both of these outlooks are wrong. One of the great benefits of technology being invented and re-invented anew on a regular basis is that it becomes better and more efficient. Even a hardened eco-worrier must recognise, for instance, that todays mobile phones use less material and less energy than the more durable early prototypes. At the same time persistent chemicals are often safer and more stable than more active and volatile alternatives. In relation to chemicals regulation, the key concept Chapman introduces, upon which her book rests is that of riskiness. This, she advises, is not the same as hazard the potential for something to cause harm but rather includes the possibility of harm even when we cannot specify the nature of that harm (p.104). For years, Green activists have tried to get governments to legislate on the basis of possibilities rather than probabilities. Now, by introducing unknown possibilities into the equation, Chapman is effectively trying to move the goal-posts even further. Pigs might truly fly, and by doing so she tramples over the one element she seems to uphold elsewhere in her book that of human agency. By focusing on what actually happens rather than what might happen, real exposure rather than potential effect, the concept of risk, to a limited extent at least, takes account of human knowledge, expertise and even choice. The demand that regulation be based on inherent properties, rather than human action and experience, removes us entirely from the equation. A fitting tribute to a profoundly anti-social age. Chapman should have understood this as she draws on the work of the German political theorist Hannah Arendt in her analysis, counterposing Arendts notion of a public realm to the relatively ahistorical and ahuman outlook of liberalism and utilitarianism. What Chapman misses though is that today, such a social outlook is largely absent. It will have to be reforged from the roots up. Hence, like many others who have little real faith in the peoples ability to do so, she is left with little choice but to offer a form of patrician governance as her solution, stating that it is the duty of a government to use its powers to ensure that the public world is a good for its citizens (p.134).

In one fell swoop all her good intentions are undone as politicians are exhorted to be spectators of, rather than actors in, government (p.160). She concludes by advocating that most backward and anti-social of frameworks the planning system as her model for future decision-making about technology in general and chemicals in particular. Yet it is precisely through this that those toffs from the Campaign to Protect Rural England have managed to maintain vast swathes of this country some 92% devoted to grass, keeping the great unwashed masses, who they fear and loathe intently, at bay for so long. Sensing her solution might not suffice to crush the aspirations of the public realm she claims to crave, Chapman concludes with a demand for public interest advertising so that just as much money can be spent on criticizing as is spent on promoting products (p.168). Like those tired political leaders and commentators now considering the imposition of a party-funding levy on people, in recognition of their inability to inspire and generate active support, so Chapman, fearing that the right to know which she promotes might not suffice, now insists on a right to tell to continue exhorting the evils of chemicals. No doubt, in a few years, this will elide into a right to decide. How very New Labour! Or should I say Cameronite? Either way, Green politics and its anti-social outlook is now at home right across the political spectrum. There remain serious issues to address in the production, introduction and regulation of technologies, but those looking for answers will only find disguised calls for restraint and disingenuous demands for dialogue here.

References
Colborn,T., Dumanoski, D. and Myers, J.P. 1996 Our Stolen Future. London: Abacus.

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Book review

Science and certainty

By John T.O. Kirk
CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Australia, 2007

Review by Terence Kealey

Terence Kealey, a clinical biochemist, is vice-chancellor of Buckingham University and the author of Sex, Science and Profits Email: terence.kealey =a= buckingham.ac.uk (replace =a= with @)

This is a courteous, competent and well-written book, but it is not immediately clear who wrote it, or why. The author is a John Kirk but, more than that, the reader is not told. Yet the book is published by the Australian Governments Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and from its website1 we learn that Kirk was Chief Research Scientist and Assistant Chief of Division (Plant Industry) at CSIRO, as well as a former lecturer in biochemistry at the University of Wales, so he is creditable. Since 1997 Kirk has worked for two companies, one a vineyard and the other an optics company, so his experience is wide, as is the ground covered by this book. The book is divided into eight chapters, which cover seven separate areas of science. Chapter 1, entitled Origin of the Cosmos and the Solar System provides a competent overview of the current understanding of the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. The story provided is conventional, accessible and comprehensive, and my only criticism is that Kirk is dismissive of the speculation of scientists including Edward Tyron that the mass-energy of the entire visible universe could have originated as a quantum fluctuation in nothing. Kirk dismisses that idea as bizarre but, under quantum theory, the laws of conservation of mass and energy may apparently be suspended, and a universe may indeed arise out of nothing. As Niels Bohr said, quoted by Kirk himself, anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. The universe itself, moreover, might itself amount to nothing, because when all its energy and mass are added up, they seem to amount to zero. That is because gravity has the curious property of storing negative energy thus negating all the universes positive mass and energy. If, therefore, the sum total of the universes mass and energy is zero, the universes total mass-energy may indeed arise by a quantum fluctuation in nothing.

Chapter 2 (Origin of the Biosphere and Homo sapiens) provides a competent description of natural selection and of the evolution of the human being. This covers my own area of research and I can vouch for the soundness of Kirks judgements. Chapter 3 (The Nature of Physical Reality) provides an excellent introduction to the peculiar world of quantum theory (the origin of the universe excepted). Why anyone should bother with Professor Dumbledore when they have Professor Niels Bohr is a mystery, because quantum theory is more weird than any monster that haunts the corridors of Hogwarts. But quantum theory does require some understanding of mathematics, so perhaps most people are indeed better off with JK Rowling. Chapter 4 (The Physical Basis of Conscious Reality) provides a good introduction to modern neuroscience, as well as a stimulating description of the enigma of consciousness. I was pleased to have read it. But I disagreed with John Kirk when he denied that animals other than Homo sapiens possess consciousness. In his Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) Charles Darwin described how his pet dogs demonstrated a sense of humour. That is my own experience of dogs - and can an entity possess a sense of humour if it does not possess consciousness? Chapters 5 and 6 (Environmentalism and Science and Environmental Concern) provide a fair account of current debates over global warming. My only concern is that Kirk seems not to have mentioned that global warming can be a cause rather than a consequence of higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, because warm seas release the carbon dioxide that is dissolved in them. Chapter 7 on Gaia provides an excellent account of how the various biological and geological processes that

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control the content and temperature of the atmosphere possess innate feedback mechanisms that help stabilise that content and that temperature in the face of external shocks. The great anxiety of the environmental movement is, of course, that global warming might disrupt those healthy feedbacks and generate unhealthy feedforwards such that every increase in temperature drives further increases in temperature fortunately we seem not yet to have initiated that phenomenon. The final chapter on isms asks a number of questions such as: does science have anything to say about feminism, or does science have anything to say about atheism? Kirks answers to these questions are unexceptional. For whom is this book designed? Kirk seems to have no agenda other than to reassure the reader that science is essentially a benign and honest enterprise. I agree, but only because science these days as in all days is in the hands of the rich countries, and those are currently benign democracies. But it wasnt so long since Winston Churchill was warning us of the perverted science of the European and Asian tyrannies. The book has a slightly amateur feel about it in that many of the references are to secondary sources such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and some of the illustrations are slightly jejune. On page 65, for example, we are shown an artists impression of an asteroid smashing into the earth, thus precipitating the extinction of the dinosaurs. So? But any comprehensive view of the whole of modern science must inevitably be shallow in parts, and the remarkable aspect of this book is how comprehensive yet how accessible it is.

Nonetheless, the book is not for the general reader. It is too deep for that. Any book that launches into redox reactions as briskly as this has been written for the scientifically literate. This is a book for a researcher who wants to broaden his or her perspective on the other branches of contemporary research. I can think of many a biochemist who would find fascinating the chapters on quantum theory and consciousness, and I can think of specialists in those areas who would find others of the chapters equally enlightening. To conclude, this is an unsensational account of seven of the more important areas of contemporary research, and it would make an excellent present for a practitioner in any one of those areas who wanted to keep up with developments in the other six.

Notes
1. See http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/5690.htm

References
Darwin, Charles. 1871. Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray.

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Book review

The global environment and world politics, 2nd ed.

By Elizabeth DeSombre
Continuum, London, England/New York, NY, 2007

Review by Jeremy Rabkin

Jeremy Rabkin is a Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law. Email: jrabkin =a= gmu.edu (replace =a= with @)

To judge by this book, Elizabeth DeSombre is not an ideologue. The author is now a mid-career scholar in a New England college (Wellesley), teaching political science and environmental studies. Her tone is calm and measured. She refers readers to published studies from a range of competing perspectives. The book, itself, seems designed to provide a survey of developments in global environmental policy suitable for a university course. Students assigned this book are not likely to see it as axe-grinding. For anyone who has looked into these issues, the book may be of most interest as a guide to conventional wisdom in this field as up-to-date on respectable opinion as one would expect a second edition to be. The book starts with an overview of the history and legal framework for international agreements on environmental matters. Ensuing chapters look at the role of science and uncertainty in environmental negotiations, at the distinctive claims of developing countries and the role of non-governmental actors, both non-profit advocacy groups and profit-oriented business. Then there are four chapters reviewing experience in particular fields, starting with ozone depletion and climate change, followed by separate overviews of whale conservation, of land-based biodiversity efforts (in the Amazon and elsewhere), concluding with Regional Trans-boundary Air Pollution Agreements (comparing European and North American experiences). What does it all show? Five pages of throat-clearing prose in the Introduction offer few definite claims. The comparably brief Conclusion chapter does not add much. The case study chapters suggest, according to the Conclusion, that it is difficult to gain international cooperation to protect the environment but the case studies also demonstrate the willingness of states to work together and of non-state actors to undertake

cooperative actions with states to address problems that affect the global environment. These are not exactly daring claims. Since no one would bother to dispute them, one must wonder why it is worthwhile to offer a whole book to confirm such claims. Presenting background facts may be worthwhile, of course, even if they dont add up to a particular conclusion. But the book does not simply rely on this journalistic premise. It actually does offer a more contentious thesis which is very much worth thinking about, even though the author does not subject it to any serious analysis. This more interesting thesis is stated quite forthrightly in the last paragraph of the Introduction: Environmental politics poses challenges to a lot of traditional thinking about international relations. At its most basic, environmental politics challenges the idea of sovereignty states can no longer realistically protect their own territory and populations from harm by actions they take alone. Thinking about the environment expands the sphere of concern of international relations beyond statecentric security-dominated approaches The point seems to be that environmental politics is quite different from other areas of international politics. Hence, the logic of a separate study of this field. The last paragraph of the final chapter (Conclusion) also alludes to this theme: to a large extent, all environmental politics is global. Since the environment surrounds all nations, environmental politics just has to be global in its outlook and that makes environmental politics something new and distinctive. That seems to be the thought. It might well seem a natural premise for a survey text

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of this kind. Why have a separate overview of environmental policy if it is not a separate or distinct subject? Yet there are good reasons to view it as questionable and inevitably distorting. To start with, the underlying thought is almost certainly untrue. Before activists started to focus on global environmental threats, did national governments really think that sovereignty assured all states every one of them the capacity to protect their own territory and populations from harm by actions they take alone? Why have states so often committed to alliances if they could protect themselves by actions they take alone? Looking at the history of warfare, would one really conclude that it is rare or even unusual for sovereign states to suffer harm to their territory and populations as the result of war? You might think environmental harms are different, because they do not respect borders. But how many countries caught between, say, Russia and Germany in the Twentieth Century were able to rely on mere borders for protection? Even countries that were not directly invaded and in that sense were shielded to a degree by their borders often still suffered considerable harm from blockades or attacks on ocean shipping or other economic disruptions occasioned by the world wars. It is not even clear that the harm threatened by war is less serious than the harm threatened by a worsening natural environment. To take the most extreme case, an all-out war with nuclear weapons would surely have consequences as catastrophic and much more immediate than the direst scenario of global warming over the next century. If you think environmental harm challenges the idea of sovereignty, you might think the advent of nuclear weapons would do so even more. And if you thought that way, you would have had a lot of company. But you would still have been wrong. We have been hearing since 1945 that the challenge of nuclear weapons means we must accept international controls on resort to war or at least on the capacity to deploy nuclear weapons. Somehow, such appeals have not persuaded states to entrust all their hopes for security to international institutions. Even when it comes to resisting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, there is no great trust nor all that much deference given to international institutions. To the credit of Prof. DeSombre, when she describes actual experience negotiating and implementing international environmental agreements, she does not paint an overly rosy picture. Though she does not draw this conclusion, she provides plenty of evidence that world politics is not, after all, so different when it grapples with the global environment than with other issues.
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The chapter on whale conservation, for example, notes that the Soviet Union turned out to be systematically deceiving international monitors, taking twice the catch allowable under international quotas, then concealing this delinquency behind fraudulent reports. The truth came to light only in the 1990s, when many secrets of the communist era were revealed. Todays Russia may remain more honest in its approach to international obligations, but nothing in this chapter offers grounds for confidence on that score. International conservation agreements do not seem to provide easy means for outsiders to challenge national assessments of compliance and Putins Russia does not encourage whistle-blowing by insiders. Meanwhile, developing countries in Africa and elsewhere have sought seats on the international whaling commission, even though they have little direct interest in whale conservation. These countries have learned, however, that votes in this forum can be traded for support on international policies they do care about. In general, developing countries (those that used to be called Third World) have viewed international environmental measures with suspicion unless offered direct financial inducements for participation. There are good and bad reasons for this stance and this book does not do nearly as well as it might have in exploring all the factors involved. But the general pattern is clear. On almost every measure proposed for the global environment, less developed countries have been more skeptical about making sacrifices today for the sake of averting speculative harms in the more remote future. They have also been far more insistent about demands that more affluent and environmentally conscious states provide them with hard compensation for any major costs they do accept in conforming to global protective standards. The Global Environment is relatively forthright about the policy outcomes to date. Not very much has been achieved. Even efforts to protect the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere have not accomplished very much, though protective efforts in this area, starting in the mid1980s, provided the model for most subsequent ventures in global environmental protection. Western countries have found substitutes for the coolants and aerosols thought to be depleting the ozone layer, but developing countries insisted on the right to continue production for a longer period. We still do not know whether blackmarket sales of targeted chemicals will cancel the benefits of official phase-out programs. Even on optimistic assumptions, it will take at least half a century for ozone concentrations to recover from the thinning trend of recent decades and we dont yet have enough data to be confident of a new trend.

the electronic journal of sustainable development www.ejsd.org

Current experience does not counsel despair but it surely indicates grounds for great caution. States are not easily corralled into common policies merely by abstract claims about common interests. They may well have common interests at some level of abstraction but thats far from saying they can agree on common policies. Prof. DeSombre offers part of an explanation when she distinguishes regulatory benefits that are excludable from benefits that arent. Those countries that make greater sacrifices to protect the ozone layer, for example, get no more benefit from their effort than any other countries which leaves less incentive for any one country to make great sacrifices on its own. Meanwhile, benefits may prove subtractable as when whaling conservation efforts by some nations are nullified by larger catches taken by others. Benefits may be both subtractable and non-excludable, as is true with ozone protection and climate change. Even where outsiders can be prevented from poaching or free-riding as in efforts to protect biodiversity within a particular jurisdiction (such as Brazilian rainforests) it is often quite speculative and uncertain what future benefits may be obtained from protecting endangered species, so possibly large future benefits may be undervalued by particular governments. It is regrettable and probably revealing of the authors background assumptions that this book says almost nothing about successful conservation efforts which do have an influence on the global environment. Governments have most incentive to protect fish stocks in waters adjacent to their own coasts. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea authorizes states to claim a 200 mile exclusive economic zone in which they have a free hand at regulating fishing. Almost all coastal states have claimed such a zone and most do take some effort to regulate fishing. Even countries so generally international minded as Canada have made strong efforts to protect coastal fisheries from foreign encroachments. It would have been worthwhile to acquaint students with the benefits that can accrue from placing such wide swaths of what was formerly global commons under private (that is, particular national) control. But the biggest and most characteristic failing of this survey is that it leaves readers with the impression that most problems stem, as the author says, from the tragedy of the commons: we deplete global resources and degrade the global environment because no nation has enough incentive to behave better in a world where others will not be compelled to do likewise. What seems to follow from this metaphor the environmental

counterpart to the state of nature in social contract theories is that strengthening global regulatory authority is the answer to most challenges. The thought is all the more seductive because it is, at some level, entirely logical: if it were easier to impose global regulatory obligations, there would indeed be more of them. But would the world really be better off then? One can imagine a world in which wise and impartial regulators impose just the right set of prohibitions and just the right level of constraints to safeguard the environment at reasonable cost. But one can imagine all kinds of things. One can also imagine a world in which global authorities impose controls that condemn much of the world to misery and squalor for the profit or the ideological whims of well-connected minorities. It should be somewhat easier to imagine the latter, because we have seen it played it out in so many nations, where kleptocrats or fanatics have driven their countries to ruin. To put the point succinctly, a global environmental policy looks more attractive if you imagine it is run by some international counterpart of the Swiss confederacy than by Robert Mugabes Zimbabwe. Affluent countries wont soon cede governing authority to the Group of 77 the caucus of less developed countries (now numbering many more than 77) who form the governing majority in the UN General Assembly. But the fact is that developing countries have no great reason to entrust global standards to the affluent minority. Even Prof. DeSombre notes (though without dwelling on the implications) that western nations refused to make any commitments to help poor countries cope with desertification when this subject was proposed for international action. Spreading deserts threaten the lives of many millions in Africa but calamities in Africa dont necessarily engage the interest of people in Europe or North America. Residents of Darfur could testify on this point. So could the people of Rwanda. There are very good reasons why even democratic governments in developing countries do not want to entrust their futures to the priorities of environmentalists in affluent countries. A few years ago, the Danish social scientist Bjrn Lomborg assembled some of the worlds most distinguished economists (including several Nobel laureates) to analyze proposed international responses to global challenges. They tried to rank policies by how much good they might do for given levels of investment or cost. They agreed that investments in reducing the spread of communicable disease, especially AIDS and malaria, deserved the very highest priority, followed by measures to provide dietary supplements and general agricultural improvements in poor countries, measures
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to improve the supply of safe water in poor countries and measures to open rich countries to exports from poor countries. The economists participating in this Copenhagen Consensus ranked as least promising in terms of actual improvements in measurable human welfare for resources expended or diverted proposals to slow the rate of global warming by reducing carbon use in the near term. (Lomborg 2004). If these economists are anywhere near correct in their assessments, the level of interest and attention which western environmental advocates and western media coverage give to global environmental issues is almost inversely proportionate to the benefits which proposed policies offer to human well-being, when actually considered on a global scale. At home, more affluent countries do better at reducing health and safety risks, because they have more resources to devote to such concerns. The people of such countries can afford not only to devote extensive resources to recreation and entertainment but to more high-minded or long-range projects such as providing more protection for endangered species. Concerns about acid rain, as Prof. DeSombre relates in her chapter on transboundary pollution, actually did mobilize support for curbs on polluting emissions in European countries. Dealing with basic sanitation as, for example, by assuring that drinking water is not contaminated is something which people in affluent countries take for granted.

People tend to see what they look for. If we talk about environmental policy, we imply that the environment presents issues which stand on their own. Perhaps it is almost true for issues that do not cost much to address or issues that involve such immediate threats to health that everyone supports available preventive measures. But to make a separate topic of what world politics will do about the global environment is to imagine a world in which issues can be assessed in relative abstraction from all the questions of wealth and power and divergent priorities which beset actual politics. It is to imagine we can find a more harmonious world by abstracting from the different claims of the people who inhabit it.

References
Lomborg, Bjrn. 2004. Global Crises, Global Solutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (2008) 1(2)

Book review

Blessed unrest: how the largest movement in the world came into being and why no one saw it coming
By Paul Hawken
Viking, New York, NY, 2007

Review by James M. Sheehan

James M. Sheehan is an adjunct scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of Global Greens (Washington, DC: Capital Research Center, 1998). Email: jsheehan2000 =a= yahoo.com (replace =a= with @)

Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming is environmentalist Paul Hawkens explanation and celebration of worldwide anti-globalization activism. Though there are millions of nonprofit groups and community organizations dedicated to a myriad of different causes, Hawken ties them together into one collective entity loosely described as an environmental and social justice movement. He likens the decentralized movement to the human immune system, with civil society antibodies combining to defend life on earth from greedy and rapacious corporations. Hawken also offers a very comprehensive classification system - in the form of an appendix - outlining a diversity of interconnected sociopolitical concerns ranging from global governance all the way down to the seemingly obscure light and noise pollution. It is hard to imagine a more extreme, almost fundamentalist perspective on the subject of globalization. This is ironic considering that Hawken goes out of his way to condemn religious and ideological fundamentalism and implies that globalization is an outgrowth of a mixture of Western, free market, and Christian fundamentalisms. Hawken repeatedly returns to a Manichean theme of enlightened social activism (a blessed form of unrest, as the title implies) versus wicked corporate profiteering. In Hawkens hackneyed worldview, virtually all business and corporate activity as we know it is oriented toward exploiting workers, poisoning natural resources, and destroying local economies. He gives no quarter to any corporation, save the one in which the CEO has confessed to past sins and done his penance by joining an environmental sustainability council under President

Clinton. Groups of social and ecological policy activists, on the other hand, are referred to as congregations who are in the process of healing the wounds of the earth (again, inflicted by corporations). Continuing his use of odd, quasi-religious imagery, Hawken calls this earthhealing a sacred act in which the activists repair sanctuaries of life on earth from those commercial enterprises that threaten to destroy these biological arks. Hawken stands against the entire Western system of markets and property rights that is responsible for the industrial revolution, flourishing of world commerce, and high living standards in the 21st century. He prefers a collectivist system of small, localized production, somewhat akin to autarky, that is vaguely more virtuous due to what he considers a greater harmonization with nature. Though international trade is not condemned per se, self-sufficiency is hailed as the highest virtue and even described as a human right. This naturally leads to a question Hawken never addresses: does one individuals assertion of the right to self-sufficiency trump anothers desire to trade internationally? Hawken seems unconcerned that some essential commodities, goods and services might simply be unavailable in remote communities if the so-called human right to self-sufficiency is meaningfully enforced. Hawkens preferred system offers no remedy to consumers, businesses, or communities, except for civil unrest, if governmental powers are used to protect certain local producers from competition under the guise of promoting human rights. While it would not be entirely accurate to characterize Hawken as a neo-Luddite opponent of technological progress, he reveals himself to be a sympathizer with the actual Luddites in England during the early

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1800s. This group of textile weavers protested the use of new, wide-framed mechanical looms that could be operated by lower-skilled workers and threatened to displace established weavers from their jobs. The Luddites resorted to violence, destroying mechanical looms, burning down textile mills, and making death threats to mill owners. While the Luddites are usually remembered as short-sighted opponents of progress, Hawken calls them proud artisans who were justifiably concerned about the infringement on their rights by the new technology being employed by the greedy mill owners. He laments that that the Luddites fundamental question What is progress without full employment? - has yet to be answered satisfactorily. Evidently, his definition of full employment does not include unskilled laborers, who would have lost their jobs if employers had met the Luddite demand that all weavers complete seven years of job training prior to employment. In some places, Blessed Unrest comes off as a smearladen harangue. Hawken compares conservative spokesmen, presumably people who defend modern business and trade, to defenders of slavery in the 1800s. Such a comparison is not an argument, but an insult. Hawken does not define the pejorative conservative, which could just as easily apply to former US presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, who is every bit as opposed to free trade and globalization as Hawken. In an additional smear, Hawken cites another author to the effect that business unchecked becomes criminal. Consider Russia. Look at Enron, Tyco, Unocal, Worldcom. The statement is not developed further, but mentioned offhandedly as if it were alone sufficient to prove that unregulated markets are the cause of dishonesty and theft. Yet Hawken fails to mention that Russias economy is not a capitalist system but rather one of oligarchic cronyism. Likewise, Hawken mistakenly assumes that some high profile misdeeds of US corporations are attributable to a completely unfettered free market in the US rather than a system of corporate statism. His understanding of corporate wrongdoing would be better informed by referencing Timothy P. Carneys The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money, (2006), which details the ways in which large corporations use regulatory maneuvers to advantage themselves at the expense of competitors and consumers in the marketplace. Specifically with regard to Enron, Carney shows that the companys apparent early business success was facilitated by numerous government subsidies, rulings, and policies that tilted the playing field in Enrons favor, including accounting standards that helped Enron defraud investors and shareholders.
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The misguided attribution of economic failures to free market policies extends to Hawkens perception of the World Bank. In several places, Hawken erroneously depicts the World Bank as a fanatical proponent of free market capitalism. At one point, he calls economists at this institution true believers for whom markets are exquisitely calibrated mechanisms that always work perfectly. He claims that the World Bank is guided by the theory that unimpeded market-based systems deliver more goods to more people than any other method. Perhaps he is relying on the Banks occasional lip service paid to markets, which does not prevent it in actual practice from recommending extensive market interventions to borrower governments. Almost in the same breath as he is denouncing the Banks free market zealotry, Hawken approvingly cites a policy paper co-written by World Bank economist Augusto de la Torre (entitled Washington Contentious: Economic Policies for Social Equity in Latin America) laying out numerous policy recommendations, including more social and educational spending by government, more expansive workers rights, redistribution of land, protection of small businesses from competition, and higher taxes on the rich. From this example, it is hard to see why Hawken considers World Bank economists true believers in anything except heavy interventionism. Hawken is all too aware of the World Banks dismal track record around the world. He recounts a parade of horribles committed by the institution. In borrower countries including Bolivia, Argentina, Haiti, India, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, and South Africa the indigenous and the poor have initiated countless protests against the corruption, political cronyism, privatization schemes, job losses, environmental destruction, human rights violations, deracination, mega-dams, and loss of sovereignty brought about by the World Bank. Unfortunately, Hawken fails to connect the World Banks development fiascos to its bureaucratic role as a central planner of economic development. He prefers instead to assert indignantly that the World Banks failures are the consequence of a laissez faire policy orientation. But then again, the misconception that a juggernaut of free market fundamentalism has created a totally laissezfaire world financial system pervades the entire book. The notion of the World Bank as a bastion of free market economics is also hard to square with the stated purpose of the organization: to provide subsidized loans and grants to developing countries in order to alleviate poverty and promote sustainable development. Thus, its very raison dtre is to make loans to finance development projects that cannot attract financing from the private

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sector. If, against all evidence, the anti-globalization NGO movement considers the bank to be a government-funded promoter of free market policies, Hawken neglects to explain why nearly all the major green NGOs continue to support US government funding of the institution. As the bank has made rhetorical gestures toward environmental sustainability, the most influential NGOs have clung to a piecemeal strategy of lobbying the World Bank to withdraw financial support for only the most objectionable individual development projects. Indeed, they appear to favor substantially increasing World Bank lending and development planning overall. It would have been useful to hear specifically whether Hawken believes the World Bank, which he correctly criticizes as a tool of well-connected corporate interests, should be abolished. When Hawken calls for enlarging the concept of the separation of church and state to include the separation of corporation and state, he appears open to the idea of dismantling the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization, which he savages as instruments of corporate-sponsored totalitarianism fed by religious zealotry.

Blessed Unrest serves well as a self-righteous tribute to the global environmental and social justice movements. It also serves as a well developed elaboration of the perspective which informs radical and sometimes violent anti-globalization activism around the world. However, Hawken is more interested in preaching to the converted than in making a convincing case against either economic freedom or globalization. In short, Blessed Unrest is unlikely to persuade anyone not already committed to an implacably anti-corporate worldview.

References
Carney, T.P. 2006. The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

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The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (2008) 1(2)

Book review

The world without us

By Alan Weisman
Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martins Press, New York, NY, 2007

Review by Philip Stott

Philip Stott is Emeritus Professor of Biogeography in the University of London. Email: sinfonia1 =a= mac.com (replace =a= with @)

Misanthropy the dislike, distrust, and hatred of the human species is once again dinner table chic. By contrast, both pre- and post-Homo sapiens Nature is the resurgent Goddess, Gaia, giving new, if secular, credence to Reginald Hebers famous lines in his 1819 hymn, From Greenlands Icy Mountains: Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile! Weismans book will undoubtedly become a major exegesis for the faithful of this self-loathing religion. His purpose is to imagine what the world would be like if we, as a species, Homo sapiens, were expunged from the face of the Earth: Say a Homo sapiens-specific virus natural or diabolically nano-engineered picks us off but leaves everything else intact. Or some misanthropic evil wizard somehow targets that unique 3.9 percent of DNA that makes us human beings and not chimpanzees, or perfects a way to sterilize our sperm (p. 4). How long would the Earth take to restore Eden, and to smell the day before Adam? What would happen to our finest creations, to our art and architecture, to our manifestations of the soul? And, would the world miss us, or would there be a huge biological sigh of relief ? In many ways this is an enjoyable and self-indulgent exercise, a kind of counter-futurology. I have often indulged in it myself when contemplating a derelict railway line, a deserted village, or an old quarry. It is the next stage on from the post-Wizard of Oz blight of Rachel Carsons 1960s Silent Spring (1962). But it isnt science, despite the fact that The World Without Us expands on Weismans previous essay, Earth Without People published in Discover magazine (February, 2005), which was selected for Best American Science Writing 2006, and despite the claims of some commentators that the book represents a peak of non-fiction science. Jennifer Schuessler, reviewing the book in The New York Times (September 2, 2007), gets it right when she concludes:

Weismans gripping fantasy [my italic] will make most readers hope that at least some of us can stick around long enough to see how it all turns out. In many ways, the nearer parallels are Margaret Atwoods dystopian novels, such as Oryx and Crake and The Handmaids Tale (2003 ; 1985). We are in the realms of speculative fiction, not even, perhaps, of science fiction. This is unsurprising. Weisman is an award-winning journalist, and there is nothing wrong with well-written and engaging, speculative fiction. But dystopian speculative fiction is a far cry from careful and cautious scientific prediction. We should remember that the Earth itself always changes, so that Weismans very own lingering scent of Eden, the Puszcza, the forest primeval of Poland, is but a fleeting moment in the story of the Earth, which has been largely dominated by ice, cold, open grasslands, but, above all, by the seas and the oceans. My innate scepticism inevitably rises when an author sees Eden as forest, which is, and always has been, a small percentage of the cover of the Earth, with or without humans. Moreover, our perceptions likewise change. Today, for example, the tropical rain forest has similarly grown into a hegemonic, Edenic myth. Yet there were, and are, many other ways of seeing and describing such tropical rain forests. The French geographer, Pierre Gourou, presented a markedly different entity in his magisterial survey, Les pays tropicaux (1947). The historian, David Arnold, writes that, in Gourou, there is scarcely a trace of the Edenic: poverty and pathogenicity are all pervading. The tropical world is full of horrors, a region where climate and disease are terrible foes to humankind. Likewise, Lucien Febvre, the founding historian/geographer of the Annales School, denounced the Germanic creation of the tropics as an over-idealistic geography, in which the soils were not fecund and

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in which virtually everything was inimical to humans. For him, the tropical rain forest was no wooded Eden; it was a desert, covered with verdure. Thus, for many, humanity has been the finisher and improver of Nature. Without humans, the world would return to a place in which there was neither the concept of Eden or beauty nor beauty itself, but rather a Nature red in tooth and claw. With such caveats entered, however, we can still indulge ourselves in the frisson of thinking about some of Weismans more startling imaginings. Our craving for disaster revels in the thought of the New York subway flooding within a couple of days, and Lexington Avenue caving in and turning into a rushing river. And then there are the worlds 441 nuclear plants: possibly half would burn, and the rest would melt. As the radioactive lava melds with the surrounding steel and concrete, it would finally cool if thats the term for a lump of slag that would remain mortally hot thereafter (pp. 21314). And what would happen to sculptor, Gutzon Borglums, iconic Mount Rushmore? Teddy Roosevelt would erode at about 2 cm every 10,000 years, and he might thus still be around for the next 7.2 million years. Should some equally ingenious, confounding, lyrical, and conflicted species appear on Earth again in our aftermath, they may still find T.R.s fierce, shrewd gaze fixed intently upon them (p. 182), just like the Argonath, the Pillars of the Kings, in J.R.R. Tolkiens The Fellowship of the Ring (1955), and Shelleys Ozymandias, king of kings. And in this image, one grasps that Weisman is not quite the misanthrope some might want him to be. Deep down, and at the last, he hopes that: long after were gone, unbearably lonely for the beautiful world from which we so foolishly banished ourselves we, or our memories, might surf home aboard a cosmic electromagnetic wave to haunt our beloved Earth (p. 275). Weisman thus values our souls, if not our actions. In essence, he is more a dystopian, or a utopian, according to your preference, rather than an entrenched misanthrope. Yet, as an intrepid heterotopian, this is where I must part company with Weisman. Some 9,000 years ago, near what would eventually become the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, a young woman died, probably violently, possibly the first recorded homicide in that citys long history of violence. She was aged 18 to 25, about 4 feet 8 inches tall, and the fractures in her cranium may have been caused by a grinding stone found only 4 inches from her skeleton. La Brea Woman, as she is affectionately known, was discovered in 1914. Surely, she could never have imagined the Hancock Park of
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today, with its Farmers Market, or Wilshire Boulevards Miracle Mile, housing the prestigious County Museum of Art, an automotive museum, a museum of miniatures, and a museum dedicated partly to herself. After all, her California had only just lost many of its Ice-Age animals the dire wolf (Canis dirus), the American lion (Panthera leo atrox), and, most famous of all, the saber-toothed cat (Smilodon fatalis). Every child should visit this wonderful museum, if only to see for themselves that change is the norm - past, present, and future. And we survive change, not by trying to reverse-the-world-and-get-off , but by adaptability, flexibility, dynamism, drive, and initiative. Extinction is indeed a part of life and death, as it always has been and always will be. And future humans will surely be as shocked as the young woman of La Brea would have been by the Los Angeles that will someday occupy Hancock Park, 9,000 years hence. In reality, it is quite simply beyond our imagination, even Mr. Weismans. This, then, is a book to savour on a winters evening before the fire, with a glass of single malt - and a very wry smile.

References
Arnold, David. 2000. Illusory Riches: Representations of the Tropical World, 18401950. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21(1), March 2000, pp. 618. Oxford: Blackwell. Atwood, Margaret. 1985. The Handmaids Tale. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Atwood, Margaret, 2003. Oryx and Crake. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Gourou, Pierre. 1947. Les pays tropicaux. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1955. The Fellowship of the Ring. London: Allen & Unwin.

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Note
On the Limits to Knowledge of Future Marine Biodiversity1

Jesse H. Ausubel*
* Jesse Ausubel helped found the Census of Marine Life, a decade-long cooperative international observational program (20002010) to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life. Email: ausubel =a= rockefeller.edu (replace =a= with @)

Repetition has power, like the refrain of a song. Repetition emphasizes and makes things stick. US Congressman John Brademas liked to say when he presided over hearings in Washington DC, Everything has been said, but not everyone has had a chance to say it. Nearly everyone has heard about the woes of the oceans in recent years. Many events and reports have lifted awareness of the challenges, for example, for conservation of life on seamounts. My premise is not repetition. Rather, I hope to improve our forecasts, their scope, detail, and likelihood or humility. Prediction is after all the true test of science. One of the main strategies for winning improvements is by exploring the limits to our knowledge, that is, by asking what we know and why, what we could quite readily know, and what may be unknowable or very hard to learn. We tend to fill conferences, magazines, and airwaves with what we know. We much less often explore and disclose the limits to our knowledge. Few experts like or bother to write terra incognita on their maps. Yet, disclosing the limits to our knowledge is often among the most useful of acts. Such disclosure helps people choose where to explore, and it helps people to hedge their bets. In this spirit, I will offer some generic comments and illustrations about the known, unknown, and unknowable and how they might bear on the disciplines and forms of expertise caring about marine biodiversity.

Scaling and simplification

Paramount challenges in ecology, oceanography, and meteorology involve scaling and simplification. System dynamics involve interactions among processes acting on diverse scales of space, time, and organizational

complexity. To what extent in marine ecology do we have ways to scale from small to large and back? Can we represent the dynamics of aggregates, for example, in terms of the statistical dynamics of populations of individual agents or units? A famous expression questions how much knowing about a tree tells about the forest and vice versa. What about a fish and a school, or a small eddy and a large gyre? One might ask analogous questions about individuals, households, and larger human societies who consume seafood products. Does knowing the attitudes about the ocean in detail of a Malibu resident help predict the actions of California? As analysts and modelers, we must hope that not every detail of interaction, space, and time matters to know important behavior. Otherwise, many behaviors, both macroscopic and microscopic, appear unknowable. At the microscopic scale, the multiplicity and complexity of interactions can make detailed knowledge impossible. What do we understand in marine biology about how to define, identify, and suppress irrelevant detail? Need we study life in every bay to understand life in every bay? Indeed, how confident are we that we have selected the variables that determine behavior and outcomes in the marine realm? We love temperature in these days of global warming but dare we omit ocean acidity or ocean noise? Marine microbes, though they weigh 90% of ocean biomass, were rarely recognized until recently and may be perilously omitted from analyses. Also, at all scales, unknowable or at least stochastic perturbations such as tsunamis hit systems. Can we characterize the relevant perturbations probabilistically? And what can we know about whether systems are sufficiently adaptive to absorb these influences and thus survive in roughly similar form? At a more theoretical level, what we see or live with may reflect the capricious influence of historical events

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that cause bifurcations and thus represent but one realization of stochastic processes that admit many possibilities. A debated example is whether the genetic code is the only code possible in some broad sense. But are some regimes of marine life also ecosystems that just happened because of some bifurcation? If we believe such situations common, then are future ecosystems largely unknowable, especially as humans introduce more perturbations? The antipode of simplicity is complexity, which may require modeling several sets of non-uniform interactions at once. To what extent could we be right about the whole even if unsure about some of the parts? Or if investment aims primarily at great detail about a few parts? A practical question concerns the implementation of a financially sustainable ocean observing system by, say 2020, that would usefully monitor marine biodiversity at several scales. Can we estimate how much a few expensive fixed sea floor observatories may contribute to broader synopses?

Data limitations
Models without data are empty balloons, and a related second, large set of urgent questions involve the volume of data and its limits. The single word technology establishes the most fundamental point. Humans need prosthetic devices to see, sniff, and feel the deep, the dark, the tiny, the swift, the shape-changing. Or to capture it. Our forecast of technology will determine much of what we might know as well as much of what might survive. Suppose we could, this year, instantaneously and continuously see from one or two ships the fish in the water over 100,000 square kilometers of continental shelf ? Snapshots of the ocean, even great synoptic gulps, hint at a different limit to knowledge. In some fields, including parts of biology and physics, data come from controlled experiments, allowing close matching between theory and experimental results. Experimental design is, of course, subject to a multitude of biases that may limit knowledge. At least as important is that in many fields, including oceanography, macroevolution and many social sciences, controlled experiments are impossible. Facts obtainable represent samples of what we would like to know in ways whose biases themselves may be hard to know. For marine questions our data are themselves very patchy. This fact turns into limits to vex analysts. For example, how do analysts avoid in-sample over-fitting? Split-sample analysis helps but is far from a universal solution. A variety of recent work in groups such as that of the late Ransom Myers has investigated these issues,
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incorporating bootstrap and other re-sampling methods, shrinkage estimation, and explicit consideration of the estimation efficiency loss from split-sample analyses.2 How do we acquire information from unknown structures? The emerging geographical information system for ocean life, the Ocean Biogeographical Information System (OBIS, www.iobis.org ), offers a powerful instance of the bias of present observations. While a vertical distribution of an OBIS sample of about four million spatially referenced data of ocean life shows that most observations come from near the surface, most of the habitat lies down below. Ninety percent of observations come from the top 100 meters and 99% from the top 1000 meters, while the average depth of the oceans is 4000 meters. The diversity, distribution, and abundance of life below a few tens of meters remain largely unknown or extrapolated from very sparse observations. Tantalizingly, the spare observations suggest an abyss teeming with diversity. One reason to initiate the microbes-to-mammals, bottom-to-top, pole-to-pole, shore-to-mid-ocean Census of Marine Life (CoML, www.coml.org ) was the high fraction of data about marine life relating to the 200 or so commercially most important seafood species. Frustratingly, experts engage in bloody fights about numbers even for the most observed species such as salmon and tuna. Shockingly, in 2002 the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that existing data and life history information are too meager to provide useful assessments for more than 60 percent of the 900 or so regulated fish populations in US waters. (NOAA 2002). In 2006 a CoML researcher reported that about 230,000 species of animals have been identified in the oceans (Bouchet 2006). If records abound for only a few hundred, Status Unknown or Status Little Known honestly describes a long list. And some experts believe a million or more species of marine animals remain to be identified. Other kinds of bias matter. Systems may be simply too large or long-lived to observe. Understanding the life history of animals that live for two hundred or even for fifty years challenges researchers whose careers last only about 40 years and their grants only two or three years. Rarity also makes difficulties, whether in ecological or financial systems. If a tsunami happens only once every two hundred years, how can we calibrate its impact when the life it affects will anyway have been transformed by fishing, coastal development, and other factors? Bias of a more obvious nature must also be confronted. For example, knowledge of classical history

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depends substantially on one man, Herodotus, and we do not know how additional accounts would change understanding of Greece, Persia, Babylon, and Egypt. Strongly socially constructed observations, accidental experiments, and spare historical record often form much of the known. With regard to marine life, we seem to know predominantly about what we eat and trade. Much work lies ahead to provide reliable information on the rest, for which we need clever tricks from statistics and modeling. Otherwise, practical limits of cost of sampling will keep us forever ignorant. Culture also excludes information. Western science, in large part a product of Catholic monasteries, excluded women until very recently. In turn, scholarship largely excluded study of the history or even the health of women. Some argue that male domination of science accounts for greater emphasis on competition than cooperation in ecological and evolutionary sciences as well. Academia in the USA and most other places now excludes almost everyone who has not taken identical political orders. I survive in US academia because I am a registered Democrat who often votes Green. A survey of decades of studies of the politics of American professors shows that liberals persistently outnumber conservatives by 4:1 or more (Gross and Simmons 2007). The Academy has mastered cloning well ahead of Medicine. Science should thus not be surprised that we often easily write consensus environmental reports, nor should we be surprised that much of the rest of America and the world rejects or ignores them given the genetic poverty of our tribe. Almost all researchers concerned with marine biodiversity think basically alike in a broad cultural sense. If the time were 600 years ago, our international conference would have been a gathering of Benedictine monks from dozens of different monasteries, impressed by our pseudo-diversity because some of the monasteries were in Spain, some in Transylvania, and some in Bavaria. How can we recognize our own profound and pervasive biases and access the knowledge of those whose cultures or frames of reference we reject? Marine and ecological scientists must take care about rejecting the knowledge of those outside our monasteries and about ignoring uncomfortable facts. Karl Marx wrote about the plight of Silesian weavers but never talked to a weaver of any description nor visited Silesia. As far as we know, Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, or mine, nor talked to a peasant or landowner. Some of what he failed to understand was knowable, if only he made the effort to observe, but his belief system, like the codes of the biblical book of Leviticus, rejected all abominations,

as academic ecologists reject Bjorn Lomborg. A look at the fertilizer industry gives a smelly shock that the information authors in Nature and Science repeat over and over about growth of nitrogen use is simply wrong (Frink, Waggoner and Ausube11999). The usual, alarming nitrogen projections are about as exaggerated as were the Pentagon estimates of the size of the Soviet economy. Marine biodiversity will benefit from open talk about the data we do or do not have, could or could not have, and the information we reject and exclude.

Behavior
Let me briefly mention a final area that limits knowledge and also responds to the limits, namely behavior. One of the hardest limits to knowledge is knowing what is in the mind of another. Probably nothing is more powerful than being inside the mind of the enemy. While nations, companies, and faculty engage in spying of various kinds, we outlaw torture and drugging. Even if we could enter others minds, we probably could not predict financial markets, which are the outcome of behaviors that may be fundamentally unknowable. Financial markets exemplify most obviously the difficulty of anticipating behavioral responses. Major tax reforms rarely have the expected outcomes. In the USA the well-intended Clean Air Act of 1970 and its concept of New Source Review perversely caused scores of filthy coal-burning power plants to operate to this day. We need to recognize that humans are not infrequently perverse and criminal, that cheating students, plagiarizing professors, crooked corporations, and corrupt UN bureaucrats skimming money from oilfor-food programs are natural. Human nature includes a snake brain, and individually and collectively we are rarely rational. The limits to knowledge of economic and political institutions and the danger of the fallacies of rational expectations or rational behavior more broadly weigh heavily on marine biodiversity. For example, no demographer has produced a model that successfully predicts fertility, so we do not know how many human mouths will seek food in 50 or even 30 years. Human health and disease of course also depend substantially on behavior. Trailer parks cause tornadoes, explained engineer Norman Augustine (1997). Petting zoos kill children by transmitting infections. Sushi kills, too, but only those who eat raw seafood (and even then only a tiny proportion). A profound summary of the famine and other suffering from the Sahel droughts of the early 1970s stated Nature pleads not guilty (Garcia
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1981; but cf. Hellden 1991). Not only do humans not know how numerous we will be in future, nor do we know what diet we will follow or how we will expose ourselves to the oceans. Maybe, as for orthodox Jews, shellfish will be taboo for all people. Maybe, as in much of Europe during the 19th century, women will be forbidden to disrobe at the beach and lack the opportunity to swim in public. We also should not count on the woes of the ocean earning consistent or top public attention. The 2005 release of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was almost entirely drowned by news of the sex life of Michael Jackson, a Papal funeral at which the Roman Emperor Constantine would have felt entirely comfortable, and the London wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla. Marine biodiversity needs to thrive within real limits of human interests.

Conclusion
I hope these comments about limits to knowledge with respect to scaling and simplification, data, and behavior, and possible insurance against the limits, stimulate some new thinking about marine biodiversity. Because the expert community concerned with marine life is quite homogeneous, the temptation simply to please each other with popular tunes is high. While our community may enjoy its social solidarity, our solidarity has protected few tuna so far. By defining candidly the limits to knowledge about future marine biodiversity, diverse actors may find more powerful ways to better the chances for marine biodiversity to flourish.

Notes
1. The essay was first drafted as the opening plenary talk for a Scripps Institution of Oceanography conference on the Future of Marine Biodiversity: the Known, Unknown, and Unknowable. 22 April 2005. http://www.coml.org/ history/Limits%20of%20Knowledge%202005.pdf 2. Ransom A. Myers work is available at http://as01.ucis.dal. ca/ramweb/content.php?lang=en&i=4&sub=0. See also Shao, J. 1995. Mathematical Statistics. New York: Springer.

Insurance
Many sectors in fact thrive in the face of irrational behavior and an unknowable future. Maybe fields like environmental management could learn strategy from fields like entertainment. If film producers understood behavior, every film would be a hit, while in practice most flop. The entertainment industry understands it needs to make a large portfolio of films, precisely because 90% fail. Similarly, the insurance industry copes with limits to knowledge through understanding probability. The insurance industry even deals with so-called incomplete contracts. In some cases, a fixed sum is payable if an unknowable event happens, for example, for loss of valuables such as paintings where verifying value of destroyed items is hard. A more recent variation on the theme ties insurance payout to some objective index correlated with the dollar value of the loss. In so-called catastrophe bonds the index may be a parametric description of the event, such as the Richter-scale reading of an earthquake, or some economic index, such as insurance industry losses triggered by the event. How well might fixed-sum or indexed contracts cover unknowable events in the marine realm? A key point is whether parties can find contract language to trigger a fixed-sum payment when the triggering event was unknowable ex ante. Maybe communities should begin seeking coverage for collapse of marine ecosystems. The point is insurance can cover both known and unknowable events. Obviously we want to lower the chance of collapse, but if we accept, like Jared Diamond (2005), that collapses happen, buying insurance makes sense, too.
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References
Augustine, N.R. 1997. Augustines Laws (6th edition). Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Bouchet, P. 2006. The Magnitude of Marine Biodiversity. In The exploration of marine biodiversity: scientific and technological challenges, edited by C. Duarte, 3162. Bilbao, Spain: Fundacion BBVA. http://www. marinebarcoding.org/userfiles/File/bouchetmagnitude. pdf Census of Marine Life (CoML), http://www.coml.org Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking. Frink, C.R., Waggoner, P.E., and Ausubel, J.H. 1999. Nitrogen Fertilizer: Retrospect and Prospect, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 96: 11751180. Garcia, R. V. 1981. Drought and Man: Nature Pleads Not Guilty. Oxford: Pergamon. Gross, N. and Simmons, S. 2007. The Social and Political Views of American Professors. Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Sociology. http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~ngross/lounsbery_925. pdf

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Helldn, U. 1991. Desertification-Time for an Assessment? AMBIO, Vol 20(8): 372383. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 2002. Scientific panel identifies goals for next generation of fish stocks assessments, NOAA News Release, July 30, 2002 http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/ releases2002/july02/noaa02097.html Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), http:// www.iobis.org Shao, J. 1995. Mathematical Statistics. New York: Springer.

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