Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 6.9
A pile of handicrafts. Photo © Terry Blumer. Courtesy of the Snow
Leopard Trust
this idea on its head, we get
rights-based approaches
to fisheries management.
These involve giving individuals or communities rights to fish, using
individual
transferable quotas
, for example (Charles 2002). The number of quotas issued
depends on the sustainable level of overall fishing, but because a market for quotas
is created, the price of a unit of quota depends on its value—i.e. the value of the fish
that can be caught using it.
Direct payments for conservation services fit within the MBI framework
because a market is created for conservation services where none existed before—
people's conservation actions are given monetary value based on what conserva-
tionists or governments are willing to pay. This allows externalities to be expressed
monetarily; in this case the local people are bearing costs and the global community
are obtaining benefits from conservation. Because at the moment it seems that
conservation costs, although unfairly distributed, are far below the potential bene-
fits (Balmford and Whitten 2003), the use of MBIs should increase conservation
levels considerably.
A number of
issues
have been raised concerning the use of direct payments for
conservation. In many cases, the difficulties involved in direct payments are similar
to those encountered for ICDPs, but are more explicit. For example, it is obvious
that direct payments require
long-term financing
in order to ensure that conser-
vation continues to happen. However, the chances of ICDPs or sustainable use
schemes breaking even are also not good in the majority of cases, so they too will
need long-term external support. There are costs involved in setting up the infra-
structure for developing and managing the contracts, but this too is likely to be
