Writing in the latest issue of "Nature," a trio of scientists — two of whom are associated with NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco's longtime advocacy for catch share fisheries — have proposed a similar "catch and trade" allocation policy to help bring to an end commercial whaling.
The authors, Christopher Costello, Leah R. Gerber and Steven Gaines, argue that, by allocating whale shares to nations based on "historical whaling patterns … transactions would reduce the number of whales harvested, quite possibly to zero, unlike existing protocols (that) seem to be increasing the catches."
In the Jan. 12 Nature article, headlined "A market approach to saving the whales," the authors explain that, by their estimates, global profits from commercial whaling of $31 million were nearly matched by the expenses, $25 million, of anti-whaling activism.
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