Edited by Jane Lubchenco, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, and approved July 25, 2018 (received for review March 9, 2018)
Most large-scale conservation policies are anticipated or announced in advance. This risks the possibility of preemptive resource extraction before the conservation intervention goes into force. We use a high-resolution dataset of satellite-based fishing activity to show that anticipation of an impending no-take marine reserve undermines the policy by triggering an unintended race-to-fish. We study one of the world’s largest marine reserves, the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), and find that fishers more than doubled their fishing effort once this area was earmarked for eventual protected status. The additional fishing effort resulted in an impoverished starting point for PIPA equivalent to 1.5 y of banned fishing. Extrapolating this behavior globally, we estimate that if other marine reserve announcements were to trigger similar preemptive fishing, this could temporarily increase the share of overextracted fisheries from 65% to 72%. Our findings have implications for general conservation efforts as well as the methods that scientists use to monitor and evaluate policy efficacy.
↵1G.R.M. and K.C.M. contributed equally to this work.
This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “Economics, Environment, and Sustainable Development,” held January 17–18, 2018, at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, CA. The complete program and video recordings of most presentations are available on the NAS website at www.nasonline.org/economics-environment-and.
Author contributions: G.R.M., K.C.M., G.G.M., and C.J.C. designed research; G.R.M., K.C.M., and G.G.M. performed research; G.R.M., K.C.M., and G.G.M. analyzed data; and G.R.M., K.C.M., and C.J.C. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: All data and code for replicating the results in this paper can be found at https://github.com/grantmcdermott/blueparadox.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1802862115/-/DCSupplemental.
Published under the PNAS license.
