December 1, 2021 — Marine protected areas can be a victim of their own success. By banning or restricting fishing within their waters, these reserves can build healthy populations of fish, with some swimming into neighboring waters where they can be caught. But sometimes the brimming schools are too much of a temptation, with poachers furtively darting into the protected zone for an illegal haul. Preventing this poaching is hard, experts say, because at-sea enforcement can be complicated and expensive.
Now, researchers have proposed a provocative and heretical-sounding solution: sell fishing rights within parts of plentiful marine reserves and use the money to guard other parts that remain off-limits. And in what might seem like a paradox, the approach could even end up producing more fish, the researchers reported on 17 November in Environmental Research Letters.
The proposal has received mixed reviews. “The idea may sound horrible,” says Christopher Costello, an environmental economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). And some say it’s far too risky because it could encourage governments to shrink reserves to nothing. “I don’t think you should be reducing existing no-take areas to allow more fishing,” says Jon Day, who spent 39 years helping manage Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. “That’s really dangerous.”
But other scientists and advocates are intrigued. “I could see the concept working,” says Matt Rand, who leads the large-scale marine habitat conservation program at the Pew Charitable Trusts. “It has a lot of promise.”