Department of Economics, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403;
Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106;
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Mar 19;116(12):5319-5325. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1802862115. Epub 2018 Aug 27.
Most large-scale conservation policies are anticipated or announced in advance. This risks the possibility of preemptive resource extraction before the conservation intervention goes into force. We use a high-resolution dataset of satellite-based fishing activity to show that anticipation of an impending no-take marine reserve undermines the policy by triggering an unintended race-to-fish. We study one of the world's largest marine reserves, the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), and find that fishers more than doubled their fishing effort once this area was earmarked for eventual protected status. The additional fishing effort resulted in an impoverished starting point for PIPA equivalent to 1.5 y of banned fishing. Extrapolating this behavior globally, we estimate that if other marine reserve announcements were to trigger similar preemptive fishing, this could temporarily increase the share of overextracted fisheries from 65% to 72%. Our findings have implications for general conservation efforts as well as the methods that scientists use to monitor and evaluate policy efficacy.
大多数大规模的保护政策都是提前预期或宣布的。这就存在了在保护干预措施生效之前，抢先进行资源开采的可能性。我们使用基于卫星的渔业活动的高分辨率数据集来表明，对即将到来的禁捕海洋保护区的预期会通过引发一场意想不到的“捕捞竞赛”来破坏政策。我们研究了世界上最大的海洋保护区之一的凤凰群岛保护区（PIPA），并发现一旦该地区被指定为最终的保护区，渔民的捕捞努力就会增加一倍以上。额外的捕捞努力使 PIPA 的起点变得贫困，相当于 1.5 年的禁渔期。如果将这种行为推广到全球范围，我们估计，如果其他海洋保护区的宣布也引发类似的抢先捕捞，这可能会使过度捕捞渔业的比例暂时从 65%增加到 72%。我们的发现不仅对一般保护工作具有重要意义，也对科学家用来监测和评估政策效果的方法具有重要意义。
