January 23, 2019 — A study led by Rutgers University has shown that the choice to conserve or overharvest renewable resources such as fish is often due to habits and past decisions, which could help fisheries discover why some succeed at conservation and others fail.
The study, “Path-dependent institutions drive alternative stable states in conservation,” was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It showed that conservation is significantly easier to continue once it has already been started.
According to lead author Edward W. Tekwa, those who start conserving can often continue with it, but when conservation is not being practiced, the opposite is true.