The effect of rights-based fisheries management on risk taking and fishing safety

Abstract

Commercial fishing is a dangerous occupation despite decades of regulatory initiatives aimed at making it safer. We posit that rights-based fisheries management (the individual allocation of fishing quota to vessels or fishing entities, also called catch shares) can improve safety by solving many of the problems associated with the competitive race to fish experienced in fisheries around the world. The competitive nature of such fisheries results in risky behavior such as fishing in poor weather, overloading vessels with fishing gear, and neglecting maintenance. Although not necessarily intended to address safety issues, catch shares eliminate many of the economic incentives to fish as rapidly as possible. We develop a dataset and methods to empirically evaluate the effects of the adoption of catch shares management on a particularly risky type of behavior: the propensity to fish in stormy weather. After catch shares was implemented in an economically important US West Coast fishery, a fisherman's probability of taking a fishing trip in high wind conditions decreased by 82% compared with only 31% in the former race to fish fishery. Overall, catch shares caused the average annual rate of fishing on high wind days to decrease by 79%. These results are evidence that institutional changes can significantly reduce individual, voluntary risk exposure and result in safer fisheries.catch shares | occupational safety | rights-based fisheries management | risk | sustainable fisheries O ccupational health and safety regulations are often instituted in response to market failures that result in a misalignment of workers' risk exposure with their individual preferences (1). The principal justifications for regulatory intervention include excessive risk taking by workers who may not fully understand or recognize the risks they face (imperfect information) or do not bear the full cost of adverse safety outcomes (moral hazard) (2, 3). Labor market frictions and societal concern about the health and safety of those in high-risk occupations provide further motivation for worker protections (3, 4).The commercial fishing industry is affected by these types of market imperfections and is also characterized by potentially high pecuniary rewards for the physical risks involved in fishing. Safety regulations were developed in response to this recognition, as well as the observance of high fatality rates among fishermen (5). In the commercial fishing industry, workplace safety regulation and research has focused on technical solutions such as requirements to carry emergency equipment, participate in safety trainings, and obtain vessel safety examinations (5-9). However, commercial fishing is still one of the most dangerous professions, with an annual average fatality rate of more than 30 times the US average. Despite decades of voluntary and regulatory fishing safety initiatives, the fatality rate has decreased only marginally and has not decreased compared with the average rate for all US workers ( Fig. 1) (10, 11).Fishermen are often ...

How commercial fishing effort is managed

“…As the market decreases the total number of crew needed to harvest in an ITQ system, the remaining or entering participants receive a higher potential income, as they each earn a higher share of revenue (Carothers et al., ). Furthermore, ending the race‐to‐fish means jobs are safer, as harvesters are less likely to go out in bad weather as in the US West Coast groundfish trawl fishery (Pfeiffer & Gratz, ) and the Gulf of Mexico red snapper fishery (Boen & Keithly, ). In the “Deadliest Catch” Alaska crab fishery, crew fatalities dropped from an average of over one per year to one total in the nine years following ITQs (NPFMC, ).…”

Classifying fishing behavioral diversity using high-frequency movement data

“…For example, in our case study, the introduction of individual quotas that eliminate the race to fish and spread fishing over a longer season may have greater impacts on risk-tolerant fishers (6), such as our FB2 group. On the other hand, area-based management might have a different impact on each of our 3 groups, such as the more mobile and exploratory vessels in our FB1 and FB2 groups (15,29,30).…”

“…Although vessel movement paths have to date been used mostly to map activities (e.g., fishing, searching, and cruising, ref. 12) or characterize fishing practices (13), these data also provide insights to spatial behaviors, such as the tendency to explore new grounds (14) or to fish in rough seas, indicating tolerance to risk (15,16).…”

Gulf of Mexico Seafood Harvesters: Part 3. Potential Occupational Risk Reduction Measures

“…High winds correlate with higher waves and stormy conditions. The USCG saw an 83% decrease in incident rate in this fishery after the IFQ system was used rather than season compression [57]. A study examined data in the GoM where a shift was made from the seasonal closures to IFQs for two reef fish, grouper and red snapper.…”