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Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Fisheries: The Case of Multiple Regulatory Instruments in Sweden

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Abstract

The fishing sector is a candidate for efficient climate policies because it is commonly exempted from greenhouse gas taxes and the fundamental problem of using a common pool resource is far from optimally solved. At the same time, fisheries management has other objectives. This study uses Swedish fisheries to analyse how the fishing sector and its climate impact are affected by regulations aiming at: (1) solving the common pool problem (2) taxing greenhouse gas emissions and (3) maintaining small-scale fisheries. The empirical approach is a linear programming model where the effects of simultaneously using multiple regulations are analyzed. Solving the common pool problem will lead to a 30 % reduction in emissions and substantially increase economic returns. Taxing greenhouse gas emissions will further reduce emissions. Policies for maintaining the small-scale fleet will increase the size of this fleet segment, but at the cost of lower economic returns. However, combining this policy with fuel taxes will reduce the size of the small-scale fleet, thus counteracting the effects of the policy. If taxation induces fuel-saving innovations, it is shown that this will affect not only emissions and fleet structure, but also quota uptake.

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Notes

  1. It is assumed that the marginal cost to society of an additional ton of CO\(_{2}\) is equal for all emission levels. It could be argued that the marginal damage differs (or is even unknown, see e.g. Segerson (1988) about nonpoint pollution), but equal marginal damage is realistic considering that Swedish fisheries only marginally affects global climate.

  2. Fishermen might to some extent be able to change catch composition by changing fishing practices. However, Pascoe et al. (2007) argue that these possibilities are limited, although larger for larger vessels. Part of the flexibility is changing fishing grounds, which will be captured as a different métier in this model.

  3. This could be viewed as a gear restriction that does not restrict effort from increasing. The regulation is thus defined as regulated open access in the terminology used in Sect. 2, see e.g. Waldo et al. (2013) for an example of increased effort in the herring fishery using passive gear.

  4. The reason for this exception is that some of the pelagic quota left unutilized will be caught by smaller demersal vessels in the Stern scenario, but when the price increases to the level in the National scenario this will no longer be profitable.

  5. An alternative would be a non-linear model which will avoid ‘jumps’ in effort allocation. However, non-linear models are problematic to solve with many dimensions and management restrictions as is the case in fisheries.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge funding from the Nordic Council of Ministers for the project Economic consequences of abolishing fuel subsidies for fishing vessels (Project No. (58) 2012), and input from the project participants; Ola Flaaten, Nguyen Ngoc Duy, Hans Ellefsen, Jónas Hallgrimsson, Cecilia Hammarlund, Øystein Hermansen, John Isaksen, Frank Jensen, Dadi Mar Kristoffersson, Marko Lindroos, Max Nielsen, Fredrik Salenius, and Daniel Schütt; and from Karin Bergman. Additional funding from the Swedish Research Council Formas (Project No. 229-2009-616) is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Uppsala, Sweden

    Staffan Waldo

  2. Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management, Göteborg, Sweden

    Anton Paulrud

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Correspondence to Staffan Waldo.

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Waldo, S., Paulrud, A. Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Fisheries: The Case of Multiple Regulatory Instruments in Sweden. Environ Resource Econ 68, 275–295 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-016-0018-2

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