Source: The UC Santa Barbara Current
Author: James Badham
You have probably heard that wild fish are in peril around the world, and that in some places their populations are in precipitous decline. That is particularly true on the high seas, or international waters.
Operating as a massive unregulated global commons, where any nation can take as much as it wants, the high seas are experiencing a latter-day “tragedy of the commons,” with the race for fish depleting stocks of tuna, billfish and other high-value migratory species.
A new paper, written by Christopher Costello, a professor of resource economics at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and Crow White, an assistant professor in the biological sciences department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a former Bren School postdoctoral researcher, suggests a bold approach to reversing this decline: close the high seas to fishing.
For more, go to: www.news.ucsb.edu/2014/014046/could-closing-high-seas-fishing-save-migratory-fish
