Obama Administration Pushes "Cap-and-Trade" for Fisheries

While some might say that fish packagers are adopting their own clever ways to lower the impact on fish stocks

, the problem of the “tragedy of the commons” in the world’s oceans is not going away.
Yesterday NOAA proposed an alternative to traditional commercial catch management policies by pushing “fish shares” as one answer to commercial overfishing. As Allison Winter and Dina Fine Maron report in The New York Times this morning, the catch-share

system could provide clear advantages, specifically fresher fish (commercial operations fish on their own schedule) and a lowered chance of fishing a stock to depletion.
“Catch-share management regimes are a relatively new approach to managing fish stocks by imposing a strict overall catch limit and dividing that total catch among buyers. In the past year, the journals Science and Nature have published studies that found catch shares can increase the abundance of fish and cut in half the collapse rate for fisheries.”