ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
The blue paradox: Preemptive overfishing in marine reserves.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- On the potential for strategic behavior in jurisdictional REDD.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Global expansion of marine protected areas and the redistribution of fishing effort.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Evidence of anticipatory forest use behaviours under policy introduction: a systematic map protocol.Environmental evidence · 2023Article
- Fishing activity before closure, during closure, and after reopening of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Role of economics in analyzing the environment and sustainable development.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Unraveling the blue paradox: Incomplete analysis yields incorrect conclusions about Phoenix Islands Protected Area closure.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Reply to Hanich et al.: Alternate explanations for the blue paradox do not withstand statistical scrutiny.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
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.
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