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. 2016 Mar 8;113(10):2615-20.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1509456113. Epub 2016 Feb 16.

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

Lisa Pfeiffer  1 , Trevor Gratz  2
Affiliations

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

Lisa Pfeiffer et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

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.

Keywords: catch shares; occupational safety; rights-based fisheries management; risk; sustainable fisheries.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Annual fatality rates of fishers and all workers in the United States. Figure was created with data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Note: 1993 is the first year in which data are available online.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Change in the annual average rate of fishing on high wind days. Estimates result from difference-in-differences regression of the annual vessel average rate of fishing on high wind days. Individual fixed effects included. Bars show 95% CIs around the estimates. SEs in parentheses. Number of observations: 5,396. R2 = 0.50.
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