Edited by Sumaila, U.R., and Alder, J.

Part 1 pages 1-92
Part 2 pages 93-145
Part 3 pages 146-197
Part 4 pages 198-245

ABSTRACT

This Report documents most of the presentations given at an international conference on the Economics of Maine Protected Areas (MPAs) on July 6 to 7, 2000 at the UBC Fisheries Centre. MPAs are areas in a marine habitat that are closed either partially or completely to fishing. They have recently been promoted as complements to traditional fisheries management in the literature. The conference sought to provide a forum for academics, government and private sector actors to present, share ideas, information and models for assessing the benefits of MPAs. The focus of the conference was on the analysis and modelling of economic and social aspects of MPAs. As the papers in this volume show, the presentations were multidisciplinary in scope, covering the state of the art in the analysis of the use of MPAs as management tools for sustainable fisheries.

Results reported at the conference include:

• protecting one of the subpopulations in a stochastic model reduces the sum of squared deviations of catches and effort while the average catch increases;
• to assess the potential benefits of MPAs to fisheries one needs to factor in possible benefits arising from improvements in habitat within reserves, and the lower management costs that MPA implementation could lead to;
• the success of MPAs hinges on the development of economic alternatives for former users of the areas protected;
• if the current fisheries management system is inefficient and no improvement is expected, it is very hard to provide an economic reason for introducing MPAs;
• incorrectly sized or located MPAs may increase the risk of depletion;
• small MPAs with artificial reefs achieve little to avert collapse of fisheries or shift towards catches of low trophic level species;
• accounting for the non-consumptive economic value of fish abundance and size may have a large impact on the economic viability of ecologically functional MPAs;
• in the presence of a limited entry license system, reserve creation can produce a win-win situation where aggregate biomass and the common license price increase;
• MPAs can have differential impacts on the various players involved in a fishery;
• the possibility of spatial heterogeneity in fish stocks implies that an MPA can impact on biodiversity in potentially undesirable ways;
• MPAs can help hedge against uncertainty, especially in cooperatively managed fisheries;
• the precautionary approach in fisheries management implies that economic loss due to the implementation of MPAs will have to be very large to make the establishment of MPAs economically unwise.

The reader is invited to explore further these and other results presented at the conference by reading the papers contained in this volume.

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