Abstract
The purpose of this article is to investigate the link between marine pollution and marine renewable resources. An extended bio-economic model of a fishery is developed to include nutrient enrichment and built into a general model of the polluting and fishery sector with nutrient concentration and fish stock as state variables. The marginal damage function for nutrient enrichment is derived. This function can be compared with the marginal abatement cost and hence it provides a basis for policies that balance the use of nutrients in land-based industries (for example agriculture) with the external cost to the marine environment. The model is empirically applied to the case of the Baltic Sea, where Eastern Baltic cod fisheries are affected by nutrient enrichment. The results indicate that nitrogen loading needs to be reduced slightly (around 1 %) to reach optimal levels. The results also show that the optimal fishery policy plays a more important role in producing the net benefits than nitrogen reduction policies do. Further, the impact on the productivity of the fish stock from pollution reduction is higher when an optimal policy is followed.
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Notes
HELCOM is responsible for monitoring and implementing the 1988 Ministerial Declaration. The Commission originally includes six countries: Denmark, Sweden, Soviet Union, the Polish People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany.
See also Heal et al. (2005) for a discussion of the different valuation methods and their varying applicability to the valuation of ecosystem goods and services.
There is several applications using habitat-fishery linkages (Barbier and Strand 1998 and Barbier 2003), while other studies the impacts on fisheries of other coastal environmental changes (Kahn and Kemp 1985 and McConnell and Strand 1989). However, none of these studies explicitly derive the marginal damage function.
We have chosen this timing of harvest, growth and recruitment, because it fits with our empirical example. The basic results do not change with other timing assumptions (e.g. the end of period t).
Since the growth function is multiplied by the escapement, the growth function is compounding forward the escapement at the rate of growth. The result is the spawning biomass at the end of the year after harvest and before addition of the recruitment.
The index for time is left out of the net-benefit functions to facilitate reading.
The data is available upon request.
There might be indirect and long term effects through the food web. For example, nutrient enrichment may cause an increase of phytoplankton population that is eaten by zooplankton. Sprat, which is the prey for herring, eats zooplankton and cod eats herring.
The quadratic function form was tested empirically using data from the eastern Baltic cod fishery, but the results were not successful. Estimated parameters showed an upward parabola.
From REF helcom the total load is 744,900 ton year\(^{-1}\). According to Wulff et al. (2006) 84 % of the total load enters the Baltic Proper.
Kindly suggested by one of the reviewers.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank participants at the II Workshop on age-structured models in fishery economics and bioeconomic modelling (2011), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology Seminar (2012) and The Danish Environmental Economic Conference (2013) for comments and suggestions. We would like to thank Brooks A. Kaiser, Dale Squires and Ola Flåten for helpful comments. Thanks also to anonymous reviewers for valuable advice and comments. The research leading to these results has partly received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007-2013] under Grant agreement number 226675 (KnowSeas project). Any errors are the responsibility of the authors.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
See Appendix Table 7.
Appendix 2
See Appendix Table 8.
Appendix 3
Solving the first order necessary conditions for the problem (4).
All derivatives marked with subscript capital letters are evaluated at time \(t\). From Eqs. (6), (7), (8), and (9) we have
In equilibrium, all variables are stationary over time; therefore the \(t\) subscript can be dropped
From (30) we observe that the costate variable \(\varphi \) is negative because “more nutrient concentration” is “bad”. In equilibrium the growth function (2) and the nutrient Eq. (1) are as follows:
Substituting (29) and (33) into (31) yields
Given a discount rate \(r\) and the other economic and biological parameters, equation (35) can be solved for the optimal stock level, \(S\)*, as a function of nutrient concentration \(N\). Furthermore, the optimal harvest level, \(H\)*, can be derived from (33) as a function of N. To find N* we substitute (29), (30) and (33), (34) into (32) which yields
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Nguyen, T.V., Ravn-Jonsen, L. & Vestergaard, N. Marginal Damage Cost of Nutrient Enrichment: The Case of the Baltic Sea. Environ Resource Econ 64, 109–129 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-014-9859-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-014-9859-8