Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Although it may not be mandatory to carry out such economic assessments in other
legislative jurisdictions, the socio-political appetite for conservation measures is likely to
be higher if such an economic evidence base supports the case for the measures.
In many marine-focused interventions, there are likely to be stakeholder groups that
have a common shared interest, are well resourced in terms of the funds for lobbying, have
direct access to decision-makers, and might make not just a fiscal case for continuing re-
source extraction and ecosystem exploitation, but also a social and cultural case. By con-
trast, the beneficiaries of conservation measures may be the general public at large. The
ecosystem approach explicitly entails trade-off analysis wherein increases in the provi-
sioning of a range of services are juxtaposed with decreases in the provisioning of others,
weighted with respect to marginal change and the value of the service to society. As such
an economic efficiency assessment of a marine focused management measure can in theory
provide a level playing field and a like-for-like comparison, although there are limitations
to this approach (set out in
Section 7.4
). Although a vocal, well-organized lobby might still
prevail, irrespective of any efficiency arguments supporting a conservation measure, such
economic arguments typically hold sway, especially in the light of the current global reces-
sion.
Note that it is not the contention that all conservation measures are efficient - this
would clearly be erroneous. The argument is more that since decisions tend to be made
- for better or for worse - using the economic unit-of-account of money then a failure to
value the ecosystem service benefits generated by conservation measures in the same unit-
of-account can lead to resource over-extraction and unsustainable practices.
For the MCZ case study, it is noteworthy that many such vocal and well-organized
stakeholder groups are to be potentially adversely affected by the marine spatial planning
designations, including the oil and gas industry, the telecommunications sector, and indeed
fishermen, although there is an argument here that the off-site spillover benefits as stocks
recover might exceed the short-term costs of MCZ restrictions (Dugan and Davis,
1993
;
