Department of Economics, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, Saunders Hall 532, 2424 Maile Way, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA.
Information and Computer Sciences, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, 103 Keller Hall, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA.
Nat Commun. 2020 Feb 20;11(1):979. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-14588-3.
Two of the largest protected areas on earth are U.S. National Monuments in the Pacific Ocean. Numerous claims have been made about the impacts of these protected areas on the fishing industry, but there has been no ex post empirical evaluation of their effects. We use administrative data documenting individual fishing events to evaluate the economic impact of the expansion of these two monuments on the Hawaii longline fishing fleet. Surprisingly, catch and catch-per-unit-effort are higher since the expansions began. To disentangle the causal effect of the expansions from confounding factors, we use unaffected control fisheries to perform a difference-in-differences analysis. We find that the monument expansions had little, if any, negative impacts on the fishing industry, corroborating ecological models that have predicted minimal impacts from closing large parts of the Pacific Ocean to fishing.
地球上最大的两个保护区是位于太平洋的美国国家纪念碑。人们对这些保护区对渔业的影响提出了诸多说法，但对它们的影响还没有进行事后的实证评估。我们使用记录个别捕鱼事件的行政数据，来评估这两个纪念碑的扩大对夏威夷延绳钓渔业船队的经济影响。令人惊讶的是，自扩大以来，渔获量和单位努力渔获量都有所增加。为了将扩大的因果效应与混杂因素区分开来，我们使用未受影响的对照渔业来进行差异分析。我们发现，纪念碑的扩大对渔业几乎没有产生任何负面影响，这与生态模型的预测结果相符，即关闭太平洋的大部分地区进行捕鱼对生态系统的影响很小。
