Publications

Climate change is altering the productivity of marine fisheries and challenging the effectiveness of historical fisheries management. Harvest control rules, which describe the process for determining catch limits in fisheries, represent one pathway for promoting climate resilience.  In the United States, flexibility in how regional management councils specify harvest control rules has spawned diverse approaches for reducing catch limits to precautionarily buffer against scientific and management uncertainty, some of which may be more or less resilient to climate change. Here, we synthesize the control rules used to manage all 507 U.S. federally-managed fish stocks and stock complexes. We classified these rules into seven typologies: (1) catch-based; (2) constant catch; (3) constant escapement; (4) constant F; (5) stepped F; (6) ramped F, and (7) both stepped and ramped F. We also recorded whether the control rules included a biomass limit (“cutoff”) value or were environmentally-linked as well as the type and size of the buffers used to protect against scientific and/or management uncertainty. Finally, we review the advantages and disadvantages of each typology for managing fisheries under climate change and provide seven recommendations for updating harvest control rules to improve the resilience of U.S. federally-managed fisheries to climate change.

This paper reviews and extends the recent empirical literature on the impact of climate change on mortality and adaptation in the United States. The analysis produces several new facts. First, the reductions in the impact of extreme heat on mortality risk previously documented up to 2004 have continued up to 2019, consistent with continued investments in health-protecting adaptations to high temperatures. The second part of the paper examines the private and external costs of electricity generation and consumption related to high temperatures, a commonly-used proxy for measuring the consumption of adaptation services. Extreme temperatures increase electricity demand in the residential sector (relative to moderate temperatures), but not in the commercial, industrial, and transportation end-use sectors. The additional electricity demand in response to high temperatures results in significant external costs due to the release of local and global pollutants caused by the combustion of fossil fuels in order to produce electricity. These external costs, documented for the first time in this paper, are one order of magnitude larger than the private cost of adaptation associated with electricity consumption.

Since its release in 2010, the US government’s social cost of carbon (SCC) has played a central role in climate policy both domestically and internationally. However, rapid progress in climate science and economics over the past decade means that the original SCC estimate is no longer based on the frontier of scientific knowledge. Specifically, extensive new research about the climate, the economy, and their relationship has altered our understanding of the magnitudes of the projected physical and economic impacts of climate change, as well as their heterogeneity across space and time. This article, which was written as the Biden presidential administration was actively rebuilding the US SCC, provides concrete recommendations on how to base the SCC on the most recent research advances and thus return it to the scientific frontier.

China’s power system is highly regulated and uses an “equal-share" dispatch approach. However, market mechanisms are being introduced to reduce generation costs and improve system reliability. Here, we quantify the climate and human health impacts brought about by this transition, modeling China’s power system operations under economic dispatch. We find that significant reductions in mortality related to air pollution (11%) and CO₂ emissions (3%) from the power sector can be attained by economic dispatch, relative to the equal-share approach, through more efficient coal-powered generation. Additional health and climate benefits can be achieved by incorporating emission externalities in electricity generation costs. However, the benefits of the transition to economic dispatch will be unevenly distributed across China and may lead to increased health damages in some regions. Our results show the potential of dispatch decision-making in electricity generation to mitigate negative impacts of power plant emissions with existing facilities in China.

The use of vessel tracking systems (VTS) on small-scale fishing vessels can provide data necessary for improved fisheries management. Nevertheless, the adoption of mandated VTS is still limited in small-scale fisheries given the hardship of establishing and enforcing vessel tracking regulations in this fishing sector. However, there is potential for incentivizing voluntary adoption of tracking programs in small-scale vessels. We surveyed small-scale fishers from Indonesia (n = 124) and Mexico (n = 87) to identify which attributes and conditions increase the likelihood of adoption of VTS programs. The survey included a choice experiment to elicit fishers' preferences over attributes of safety, privacy, and data ownership of hypothetical VTS programs along with a bidding game to gauge fishers' willingness to pay. Our results indicated that most fishers in Indonesia and Mexico are willing to pay for VTS programs. VTS programs that included a safety feature were preferred over those that did not. Fishers also indicated that they would prefer VTS programs that provide ownership of the data to fishers or the government instead of the industry or the public. Additionally, we found that individual fisher characteristics are strongly related to willingness to pay and are better predictors of fishers' willingness to pay than the program attributes. Understanding which VTS programs are more likely to be adopted, and by whom, is crucial to uncover the potential of this technology in informing small-scale fisheries management and supporting resource governance.

Clean cooking transitions can have profound public health, environmental and societal gains for 2.6 billion people in the Global South. We use data from the largest household energy survey (n= 7,389) in Ghana to provide novel insights. One, regression analysis with thirteen commonly cited socio-economic and demographic predictors indicates that these factors have remarkably different levels of influence at different stages of the transition process. We propose a stage-based intervention strategy and customer targeting approach that could be a paradigm shift in how clean cooking interventions are rolled out. Two, we identify factors that are associated with exclusive use of LPG using a statistically powered sample of exclusive LPG users (n= 693). We find that everything else being equal, increases in wealth, and residing in an urban location are not associated with a transition from primary to exclusive LPG use.

The magnitude of subsidies provided to the fishing sector by governments worldwide is immense—an estimated $35.4 billion USD per year. The majority of these subsidies may be impeding efforts to sustainably manage fisheries by incentivizing overfishing and overcapacity. Recognizing the threat these subsidies pose, the World Trade Organization has set a goal of reaching an agreement that would end fisheries subsidies that contribute to overcapacity, overfishing, and illegal fishing. However, negotiations have been hampered by uncertainty around the likely effects of reforming these subsidies. Here we present a novel method for translating a bioeconomic model into an interactive online decision support tool that draws upon real-world data on fisheries subsidies and industrial fishing activity so users can directly compare the relative ambition levels of different subsidy reform options.

As the human population and demand for food grow¹, the ocean will be called on to provide increasing amounts of seafood. Although fisheries reforms and advances in offshore aquaculture (hereafter ‘mariculture’) could increase production², the true future of seafood depends on human responses to climate change³. Here we investigated whether coordinated reforms in fisheries and mariculture could increase seafood production per capita under climate change. We find that climate-adaptive fisheries reforms will be necessary but insufficient to maintain global seafood production per capita, even with aggressive reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. However, the potential for sustainable mariculture to increase seafood per capita is vast and could increase seafood production per capita under all but the most severe emissions scenario. These increases are contingent on fisheries reforms, continued advances in feed technology and the establishment of effective mariculture governance and best practices. Furthermore, dramatically curbing emissions is essential for reducing inequities, increasing reform efficacy and mitigating risks unaccounted for in our analysis. Although climate change will challenge the ocean’s ability to meet growing food demands, the ocean could produce more food than it does currently through swift and ambitious action to reduce emissions, reform capture fisheries and expand sustainable mariculture operations.

The spatial distribution of many public lands in the western U.S. is an artifact of 19th century land-disposal policies. While this legacy is sometimes an impediment to conservation, it may also provide novel opportunities to spatially reorganize public conservation lands within realistic budget constraints. Here we seek to understand the conservation potential of strategically rearranging inaccessible (“stranded”) public land in Montana, US. We use conservation reserve network design and consider coarse- and fine-filter conservation features—land cover types and predicted habitat for 12 umbrella species, respectively—and incorporate habitat connectivity corridors into one reserve design scenario. All conservation reserve network designs are constrained by a budget equal to the current value of stranded public land parcels and seek to meet or exceed the extent of conservation currently provided by stranded parcels with respect to land cover type and predicted species habitat. We find that each conservation reserve simulation expands the total protected area in Montana within the realistic budget constraint. Two maximum coverage scenarios, which exhaust the budget, result in reserve designs that substantially exceed coarse- and fine-filter conservation targets. All reserve designs provide landscape connectivity benefits. Our results illustrate notable and practical opportunities to develop conservation reserve networks in the western US that account for landscape connectivity and that benefit both private landowners and biodiversity conservation efforts through land trades and acquisitions.

Using 40 countries’ subnational data, we estimate age-specific mortality-temperature relationships and extrapolate them to countries without data today and into a future with climate change. We uncover a U-shaped relationship where extre6me cold and hot temperatures increase mortality rates, especially for the elderly. Critically, this relationship is flattened by higher incomes and adaptation to local climate. Using a revealed-preference approach to recover unobserved adaptation costs, we estimate that the mean global increase in mortality risk due to climate change, accounting for adaptation benefits and costs, is valued at roughly 3.2% of global GDP in 2100 under a high-emissions scenario. Notably, today’s cold locations are projected to benefit, while today’s poor and hot locations have large projected damages. Finally, our central estimates indicate that the release of an additional ton of CO₂ today will cause mortality-related damages of $36.6 under a high-emissions scenario, with an interquartile range accounting for both econometric and climate uncertainty of [−$7.8, $73.0]. These empirically grounded estimates exceed the previous literature’s estimates by an order of magnitude.

Costs of fighting wildfires have increased substantially over the past several decades. Yet surprisingly little is known about the effectiveness of wildfire suppression or how wildfire incident managers prioritize resources threatened within a wildfire incident. We investigate the determinants of wildfire suppression effort using a novel empirical strategy comparing over 1,400 historical fire perimeters to the spatial distribution of assets at risk. We find that fires are more likely to stop spreading as they approach homes, particularly when homes are of greater value. This effect persists after controlling for physical factors (fuels, landscape, and weather) using a state-of-the-art wildfire simulation tool. As well, the probability that spread will be halted is affected by characteristics of homes 1–2 kilometers beyond a fire’s edge. Overall, we find that suppression efforts can substantively affect wildfire outcomes but that some groups may benefit more from wildfire management than others.

Credit markets and property rights are fundamental for modern economies, but they also have implications for the commons. Using a dynamic model of competitive resource extraction, we show that improving property right security unambiguously increases conservation incentives, but the effect of credit markets on resource extraction effort hinges on the security of property rights. We test these predictions using data on global fisheries, credit markets, and the largest-ever marine property rights assignment. We find that property right security reduces resource extraction, while credit market development increases resource extraction under insecure property rights but reduces resource extraction under secure property rights.

Fuel break effectiveness in wildland-urban interface (WUI) is not well understood during downslope wind-driven fires even though various fuel treatments are conducted across the western United States. The aim of this paper is to examine the efficacy of WUI fuel breaks under the influence of strong winds and dry fuels, using the 2018 Camp Fire as a case study. The operational fire growth model Prometheus was used to show: (1) downstream impacts of 200 m and 400 m wide WUI fuel breaks on fire behavior and evacuation time gain; (2) how the downstream fire behavior was affected by the width and fuel conditions of the WUI fuel breaks; and (3) the impacts of background wind speeds on the efficacy of WUI fuel breaks. Our results indicate that WUI fuel breaks may slow wildfire spread rates by dispersing the primary advancing fire front into multiple fronts of lower intensity on the downstream edge of the fuel break. However, fuel break width mattered. We found that the lateral fire spread and burned area were reduced downstream of the 400 m wide WUI fuel break more effectively than the 200 m fuel break. Further sensitivity tests showed that wind speed at the time of ignition influenced fire behavior and efficacy of management interventions.

Natural resources such as carbon, water, and fish are increasingly managed with markets that require an initial allocation of property rights. In practice these rights are typically grandfathered based on historical use, but rights could be allocated any number of ways. Taking the perspective of a currently unregulated firm, we ask how the anticipation of a future market affects extraction incentives, environmental quality, and welfare prior to the implementation of the market. We show that this anticipation has first-order welfare implications, seemingly contradicting the widely held belief that the allocation of rights has no aggregate welfare consequences. The most egregious case involves anticipation of a traditional grandfathering rule, which induces a race for allocation before the market goes into effect, causing over-extraction or over-emissions, even relative to the completely unregulated baseline. We derive an alternative allocation rule called "Reverse-Grandfathering" that still provides a free allocation of rights but reverses the marginal incentive to emit or extract. We show that this new approach, which relies on incentives due to anticipation, can replicate welfare-maximizing firm behavior, even in the complete absence of regulation. To illustrate the potential magnitude of anticipation effects, we develop and parameterize a structural model of a hypothetical market among nearly 5,000 large fishing firms on the high seas. Relative to traditional grandfathering and auctioning of rights, ReverseGrandfathering substantially increases natural resource stocks and welfare.

The adoption of sustainable alternative foods could potentially reduce the environmental burden of human food production if it can reduce demand for products with higher environmental impact. However, there is little empirical evidence for how frequent food consumption declines are when alternative foods are introduced, limiting our knowledge of the potential for such introductions to drive food system transformations. Using 53 years of food supply data for 99 crop, livestock, and seafood commodities in 159 countries, we use regression analyses on 12 883 time series—each representing a single country-commodity pair—to detect sustained declines in apparent national food consumption, as well as corresponding consumption increases of other food commodities. First, we show that sustained declines in the consumption of any food item are rare, occurring in 9.6% of time series. Where declines are present, they most frequently occur in traditional plant-based staples, e.g. starchy roots, and are larger compared to animal-source foods, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where much of the future increase in food demand is expected to occur. Second, although declines were rare, we found national production rather than trade was identified as the most common proximate driver of declines in consumption, suggesting that shifts in diets have the potential to translate into reduced environmental impacts from food production. Third, we found consumption increases were nearly twice as common as declines, but only 8% of declines (from within 4% of total time series) occurred parallel to incline events within the same food group, suggesting limited interchangeability. An examination of case studies suggests that alternative foods can facilitate food system transitions, but strong relative disadvantages for existing foods across aspects of technology, markets, policy and culture need to exist in parallel to support for alternative foods across the same factors. Where existing foods are already produced in highly efficient systems, a lack of systematic disadvantage may provide a barrier to alternative foods driving change.

Labor issues and human rights violations have become the subject of rising concern in fisheries and seafood production. This paper reviews recent research on labor issues in the fishing industry, especially by environmental researchers and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) which are emerging as key players in research and policy arenas. Recent research has focused largely on severe violations such as forced labor, particularly in ‘hotspot’ geographies, often relying on indicators and risk-based approaches given the paucity of data and challenges of monitoring working conditions. This paper proposes that decent work – a concept associated with the institutional history of the International Labor Organization (ILO) but with broad implications – can contribute to overcoming gaps in the research landscape, and assessing and improving a range of labor issues in fisheries. The paper elaborates some key considerations for studying and promoting decent work in the seafood industry. Assessing and achieving decent work in the world’s fisheries requires (1) a holistic human rights approach to decent work, in which labor concerns are understood in the context of interrelated and interdependent sets of human rights, (2) consideration of the complex political-economic regimes and histories in which seafood production is embedded, and perhaps most importantly, (3) that workers play a central role and have a voice in defining and achieving decent work. The paper concludes with future directions for research and a discussion of promising and emerging policy pathways for promoting decent work in fisheries and seafood production.

Coral reef fisheries are vital to the livelihoods of millions of people worldwide but are challenging to manage due to the high diversity of fish species that are harvested and the multiple types of fishing gear that are used. Fish traps are a commonly used gear in reef fisheries in the Caribbean and other regions, but they have poor selectivity and frequently capture juvenile fish, impacting the sustainability of the fishery. One option for managing trap fisheries is the addition of escape gaps, which allow small fish to escape. We compared catches of traps with and without two 2.5 cm (1 inch) escape gaps on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. No significant differences were found in the mean fish length, total fish biomass, number of fish, fish species richness, and Shannon diversity index between hauls of the two trap designs, though traps with escape gaps did catch larger proportions of wider-bodied fish and smaller proportions of narrow-bodied fish. Furthermore, traps with gaps caught a smaller proportion of small-sized fish and fewer immature fish (though differences were not statistically significant). Linear mixed effect models predict that soak time (the length of time between trap hauls) increases the mean catch length, total catch biomass and total number of species in the catch. The relatively modest evidence for the effect of the gaps on catch may be explained by the long soak times used, which could have allowed most smaller-sized fish to escape or be consumed by larger individuals before hauling in both traps with and without escape gaps. Despite the small differences detected in this study, escape gaps may still offer one of the best options for improving sustainability of catches from fish traps, but larger escape gaps should be tested with varying soak times to determine optimum escape gap size.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an important tool for conservation but can be victims of their own success—higher fish biomass within MPAs create incentives to poach. This insight underpins the finding that fishing persists in most MPAs worldwide, and it raises questions about MPA monitoring and enforcement. We propose a novel institution to enhance MPA design—a ‘Conservation Finance Area (CFA)’—that utilizes leased fishing zones inside of MPAs, fed by spillover, to finance monitoring and enforcement and achieve greater conservation success. Using a bioeconomic model we show that CFAs can fully finance enforcement, deter illegal fishing, and ultimately maximize fish biomass. Moreover, we show that unless a large, exogenous, and perpetual enforcement budget is available, implementing a CFA in a no-take MPA would always result in higher biomass than without. We also explore real-world enabling conditions, providing a plausible funding pathway to improve outcomes for existing and future MPAs.

Small-scale reef fisheries are important commercial and subsistence activities that support the livelihoods of millions of people in tropical regions. Tropical marine fisheries typically target a diversity of species caught with a matching diversity of fishing gears and practices. Here, we explored how multiple fishing gears select for distinct functional traits of fish assemblages inside a large multiple use marine environmental protected area off northeastern Brazil. In 1833 landing interviews with local fishers, we identified 101 species, which were categorized according to six traits: body size, schooling behavior, mobility, position in the water column, diet and period of activity. Our research is the first to explore the broad patterns of gear selectivity with regards to fish functional traits for different habitat types. While gears used in reef habitats were highly selective of sedentary and benthic species that form schools with few individuals, gears used in coastal lagoons were selective of highly mobile pelagic species that form large schools. We found a low competitive interaction between different gear types, meaning there was a low overlap in trait selectivity between fishing gears. We also found direct associations between gears and fish functional traits: hooks and line targeted species that exhibit limited mobility capabilities, making these species more vulnerable to local levels of fishing effort. In contrast, nets and fish corrals targeted mobile species that exhibited a greater diversity of functional traits. Some of our results contrasted with the current literature on the topic, with differences highlighting the need for more research to clarify global patterns of trait selectivity by gear type. Our results have implications for fisheries management in northeastern Brazil: gear bans and effort caps are commonly used management measures that can foster fisheries sustainability by minimizing impacts to fish assemblage functions.