Welcome to the conference blog for Climate Change in the Northwest Atlantic, April 26-27, 2007. This blog will follow the forum over its two days of multidisciplinary discussion. Our blogger, Scheherazade Fowler, will deliver as much of the presentations, questions, and discussion as she can capture. Participants can add comments, questions, or additional notes during or after the conference.
This meeting is intended to connect people who research the science and economics of climate change, people who write about science, and people who create policies that govern how humans interact with the ocean. Our goals are to explore how humans can adapt to changes in the ocean. Because our group is professionally diverse and this conversation is a new one, we hope to uncover provocative questions and thereby improve our own research and outreach efforts. This meeting is also the first collaborative project between the University of Maine School of Law, the Aquatic Systems group at the University of Southern Maine, and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. We hope this meeting sparks future collaborative research and public education projects.
The meeting is divided into four substantive discussions: Science, Economics, Policy, and Journalism. A wrap-up will conclude the meeting and help us decide what this group should do next. We invite you to participate by following this blog, organized by discussion theme, and by adding your thoughts and comments along the way. Welcome!
Jon Sutinen tells us that how society will prepare for and respond to climate change will depend on the system that governs how we interact with marine ecosystems. This governance system has not performed well to date. In fact, those governing systems are all changing right now.
What are the trends of marine ecosystems? Marine environmental degradation has not only continued, but intensified DESPITE international action to regulate and help. How come? Jon asks: why do we find ourselves with degraded ecosystems? How do we mitigate the degradation and improve the status of these ecosystems? What are the governance challenges unique to climate change? What is needed to adapt to changes?
Governance is a framework for explaining outcomes. There are 3 basic mechanisms that drive human behavior: markets (economic drivers), government (legal and political drivers), and civil society (social drivers -- norms, trends, preferences). Each driver has features and major weaknesses, discussed below.
Markets are the principal drivers of extraction of resources, disposal of pollutants, and habitat alteration. Market prices don't tell the ecological truth: they don't reflect the full consequences of use of resources (e.g. spills and discharges, wastewater discharge, nutrient runoff). That's not necessarily because participants are "bad" or amoral people -- just rational actors maximizing their returns.
Governments: often have jurisdictions that don't map well to the ecosystem boundaries. They are fragmented and disjointed (e.g. a separation between Dept of Transportation and Dept. of Fisheries), sometimes even counter-productive. There is a lack of "political will" and the difficulty of politicians balancing short-term results against long-term consequences. There are multiple regulatory bodies working in same arena.
Social Drivers/ Civil Society. Social norms and networks influence public policy and societal behavior patterns. Incompatible social norms and conflicts among interest groups (e.g. jetski recreational enthusiasts vs. conservationists?) impede ecosystem protection efforts. Civil organizations -- Atlantic Coastal Action Program, World Wildlife Foundation, Conservation Law Foundation, The Ocean Conservancy.
What can economists do to influence these drivers? We can correct and mitigate market failures -- design or reform markets to tell the ecological truth. Calculate ecological costs of pollution, habitat destruction, overexploitation. Incorporate (as tariffs/taxes/subsidies) into market prices. Cap and trade rights to do particular activities.
We can correct and mitigate government weaknesses: harmonize policies and regulations. Combat shortsighted effects, and avoid decoupled costs and benefits (this isn't happening in the USA). And we can build and strengthen social capital. In the USA (and particularly in Maine) nonprofits and interest groups are very strong actors. That's not true in every country or region. We can help facilitate cooperation, and we can help delegate some monitoring and other functions to non-government actors.
Jon asks: How will climate change differ from the challenges like pollution, over harvesting to marine ecosystem (e.g. where there is an identifiable "bad guy" doing a particular action that hurts the environment)? The external forcing of changes will trigger disruptions in all three of the drivers of behavior. Given their inherent weaknesses, will markets, government, and civil society react well? He doesn't know the answer (but he sounds pessimistic).
Q: do you have any success stories? A: We're looking! But we see shifts from one driver to the other -- e.g. civil society discovered that polluted rivers were causing typhoid: their actions created behavior by government that regulated pollution in rivers. We have a crisis-driven reaction time: things have to get really bad for all three of the social actors to take action.
Q: Andy Pershing asks: ecologists think that climate change and variability will favor the generalist species and hurt the specialists. Do you think that's true for society, too? A: Yes. In the market sector, firms that are agile will do way better as the market changes; firms that are very specialized have a lot more risk.
Q: Lew Incze: the "protect and conserve" mentality in the public assumes that if you can "put a fence" around a resource, it won't change. As a scientist, I understand that a better definition is to protect and conserve the capacity of the ecosystem to respond to change, or to adapt to change. You can't be sure it will stay the same -- it's going to change. What you need to preserve is the ability to respond. It's related to what Dan said about putting fishermen into boxes that restricts their ability to diversify across fisheries. A: you definitely see this. We need to use proper regulatory methods to control or help resources, and so terminology or approach matter a lot.
Q: I work for a fisheries manager. We've never in 7 years had any non-economic measures available to us in order to talk about non-market values of conserving fish habitat; we have to frame everything in terms of preventing bad economic impacts of losing the habitat. We're also missing cumulative effect assessment (adding a dock here, re-sanding a beach there) of many small projects on fish habitat. We want more data and information. A: (includes Jon's answer and questioner's follow up comments) I worked for a long time for organizations collecting this kind of information, and would have been happy to share social and economic information -- but often that information doesn't seem to be used, seriously, by policymakers in making decisions. I'm not sure scientists and social scientists and policymakers are all that good at talking to one another. And we work on very different time scales -- policymakers and nonprofits need to write a report today; scientists want to study something and get back to you in two years. A: Robert: we social scientists need to get better about communicating our work to people who can use it. And although we do operate on different timescales and with different thresholds of certainty, we can provide policymakers with "ballpark" estimates that might be useful. We're also looking into how transferable non-market values are from one region to another, so that when studies are done we are adding to a knowledge base that can be used by people in similar, but not identical situations. A: Dan Holland -- we need to learn, too, about the accuracy and usefulness of our models, and how we can share or transfer what we learn from modeling.
Q: Timescale question -- how long after we collect data does it get implemented into federal policy? Scientific data has a time lag, and sometimes that's dangerous, because the resulting policy is based on old science. How about in economic data? A: It depends. Sometimes you can turn around a study very quickly. It depends on the specificity of the result you need. It also depends on the extent to which similar research has already been done. But as you're doing your ecological study and start your economic study at the same time, and it won't take longer than the environmental study. Where the delay comes in is that the economics is thrown in as an afterthought: the ecological conclusions come out and they say, hey, you've got a month, will you do an economic study? A: Priscilla Brooks: economics comes in at the end, in an Environmental Impact Statement analysis, when the alternatives have already been identified. Can't we bring the economics in earlier, so it can be involved in selecting and identifying what the options and conclusions should be? A: Jon: yes, and I blame us, the economists. We haven't done a good job explaining the value of what we do.
We know there's a high degree of uncertainty about how specific fisheries will be affected by climate change. We're pretty sure some will decline while others increase. Fisherman have a limited ability to respond to change -- slow to setup and develop ability to fish for a different species. Slow changes can be responded to, but quick and dramatic changes in productivity will hurt people, because our human structures and regulations don't permit rapid change.
Our fisheries have become more specific, because of excess fishing capacity. Regulation to limit fisheries has created specialized fishermen, less diversified.
Dan Holland runs us through the history of groundfish fishery access (driven by litigation by the Conservation Law Foundation). There is a system of A, B, and C days -- only active fishermen got A days, which are really the most usable days. B days are for special access programs. C days can't be used for the foreseeable future -- it's almost the effect of removing someone's permit. Further access restrictions are being contemplated in the Gulf of Maine.
Lobster management followed a different course: restrictions on the lobster fishing was geographically based, to allow for more local management. People can only fish within a little box; if the lobster fishery goes down in a geographic zone, a fisherman is screwed -- limited ability to switch zones. Scallop, red crab, and herring fisheries have been limited, too. This means that people who make a living by fishing have had to specialize in one particular species.
Although lobster landings in Maine have been going up since the late 1980s, it is flat or going down in MA and RI, and it's unlikely to go up forever.
How do we protect people who depend on marine resources for their living when they are not diversified and are therefore highly susceptible to the fluctuations of a particular species? The risk is coming -- how do we mitigate that risk?
individual transferable quotas?
fishing cooperatives that have access rights to multiple fisheries?
Both alternatives represent a major cultural change, and wouldn't be popular. Human culture change won't necessarily follow the same timeline of fishery population change or climate change.
Dan ends with a discussion of the international context. Fish don't recognize international borders, and populations cross borders. Optimal management requires cooperation. Game theory done by economists can help inform these sort of multilateral agreements. But changing conditions for herring stock are going to put agreements on cooperation under strain (especially because as Lew and Kevin pointed out, the science doesn't make it easy to distinguish long term trends versus shorter term fluctuations). The US and Canada have only recently developed agreement on how to share stocks of cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder on the Georges Bank. Herring is jointly assessed but not formally shared. We need economists to work together with politicians to look at the economic forces that might drive such sharing agreements.
Conclusion: New England fishermen are tightly constrained and locked in to single fisheries. But fisheries are connected -- changes in regulation or environment at one fishery will have an impact on the others. There will be cultural resistance to changing one fishery unless there's a corresponding change in diversification of the people who rely on single fisheries for their living. We need to look at regulatory models that will encourage diversification in the face of great uncertainty and risk. We also need robust international cooperation: fisheries regulation has to be international in scope. Economic game theory will be important in hammering out solutions.
Robert Johnston promises to tell us about the methods that economists use to assess economic values in an uncertain world. We need to make policy even when we don't fully know what kinds of changes are coming. These policy changes will be local, regional, national.
What can economics contribute to policy guidance? Economists are used to talking about tradeoffs. You can't have everything: how do you choose from among competing alternatives? How can you get public support for the decisions you make? This framework will be important in explaining how the linkages the scientists are discovering can be formed into policy and regulations that enjoy public support.
Economic valuation informs environmental policy. Features of natural systems represent ecological goods and services (e.g. clean air, sunshine, a beach that people like, the availability of fish) that impact human well being. Not everything has a commercial or direct economic value (e.g. the entertainment value of watching a fish run, or the health value of having clean air). Economists assign a value to these components and help policymakers maximize long term social well being. They also help policymakers weigh the benefits versus the costs.
Note: economic values are not the same as "economic impact". Well being means more than money in people's pocket or flows of cash from one person to another. These "non-market values" are harder to calculate and articulate: they impact people's well-being but aren't bought or sold. These are "use values" (e.g. the ability to go fishing, go to the beach, breathe air, see a fish jump, etc.) and "non-use values" (e.g. the existence of a viable fish run that will be there for our children, even if you're not using it -- this is a "bequest" value -- or the conservation of land or wildlife species -- there's value just in the existence of a resource, separate from its use).
How do you measure non-market values? Well, you can see the impacts of pollution on market prices on houses in the area. You can see the impact of a healthy environment by seeing how far people are willing to travel to visit or experience that place. You can design surveys that mimic bond issues -- how much would you pay in order to conserve/create a particular resource. There are other methods of measuring non-market values. Remember, it's not the same as "economic impact" -- that's where money directly changes hands around a particular resource.
Tricky things: uncertainty makes measuring and modeling economic values really tricky. Risk and uncertainty are different concepts. Risky outcomes are those that are unlikely but have a probability we can assess. Uncertain outcomes don't have an assessed probability. Economists can deal with risky outcomes, but less well with uncertain outcomes. So the task is to work with scientists who are measuring and assessing uncertain changes, and try to assign risk instead.
Climate change is an example of decision making under risk and uncertainty. If scientists and economists can translate uncertainty to risk, we can plug various scenarios into economic models.
Responses to ecosystem service threatened by global warming: 1) Protect/conserve -- but which to preserve? 2) Mitigate, offset, or replace -- but you can't replace everything! 3) Triage: preserve or replace the most valuable -- but what's the most valuable?
The language and tools of economics is useful to help people make these decisions.
Example: Fish runs in Rhode Island have been disappearing since the arrival of humans. River herring habitat can be rebuilt with fish ladders, dam notching, and dam removal. Diadromous fish populations have been growing or stable until very recently. That's good news. But in 2000 and 2001, there were major declines in fish populations -- 95-99% drop in population on herring runs. (From 631,000 fish in 1985 to 21 fish in 2006. Yikes!) Why? The consensus: it has nothing to do with the fish passage habitat -- it must be something at the estuary or ocean level. Possibilities: by-catch in sea herring fishery? Resurgence of predators like bass? Climate change? And what do you do when you are providing costly fish ladder restoration methods and the population is declining for unrelated reasons? Do you reallocate the resources to something else?
What is the optimal response to uncertain impacts? The methodology of economics moves you through the analysis. Like Kenny Rogers says: you gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em? How do you know? What is the probability you will win if you stay in the game?
You can make probability models that balance the function of $$ resources allocated into one arena (e.g. building good fish ladders, taking out dams in rivers) and exogenous events beyond the control of managers (e.g. climate change). You can also assess the social value -- the larger the social value of the "pot" in your poker game, the more it's worth to risk for a win.
It's easy to find the market value. It's harder, but not impossible, to find the non-market value of environmental resources. It's very hard to assign values to the uncertainty, but physical scientists are working on this, and it's important for scientists and economists to work together so the economic modeling is based on the best science. If the economic models are optimal, we'll make better policy decisions about allocating resources.
The frameworks exist. What we mostly need is the empirical estimates of probabilities and values, so we see the implications of putting money in one place or another.
Q: Patten White: what is the mitigation for replacing shorefront land? Replacing a sea marsh with a farm pond 5 miles inland really reduces productivity. A: Mitigation like that is really a misuse of economic modeling. If mitigation is to work, your benefits have to replace the benefits of what is lost -- right now mitigation really seems to focus on the cost side, not the benefit trade. Mitigation isn't a viable option unless what you're replacing is equivalent to what you're taking away.
Q: You focused on responding to climate change. What about preventing it? A: Same economic analysis, lingo, and process for making policy decisions that might prevent climate change. I was focusing on more local responses, but the framework is the same. I think we're starting to do that work now, but I don't think we were doing a very good job 5 years ago. (and this isn't my line of work, so I'm a little out of my league).
Q: Non-use values -- how do you value or compare the audience or population for non-use values. Is there a global audience for it? A: It depends on the resource. Preserving local farmland has a really high use and non-use value to the people in the local community; as you get further away, the non-use value of that system diminishes. But in Connecticut, as a state, there's about a penny per acre per person of conserved land. Some ecosystems can have high non-use values, because they're
Q: Priscilla from the Conservation Law Foundation: in my experience, the non-market values are rarely incorporated into policy-making. That's understandable, because they're hard to collect and measure. But what do you do to make that easier to do -- e.g. a "bank" of non-market values that you can incorporate into reports and analyses? A: there are more of these. EPA currently incorporates non-market values into its reports, and the Office of Management and Budget insists that they strip those out. (And the EPA just got sued, and lost, and was ordered to re-visit an analysis that had its non-market values stripped out by the OMB.) Also, there is a growing interest in banks and databases that incorporate non-market values and make them easier to measure and specify.
Dan Holland introduces us to the next panel, and suggests that there are three roles for economics (and economists) in a coping with the uncertain future of the marine environment in the face of climate change:
1) they evaluate the costs and benefits and economic impacts of specific potential outcomes (eg. decline or extinction of a particular fish stock)
2) They understand how economic incentives influence human behavior, and how that behavior impacts economic and ecological outcomes
3) They understand how human organizations (government, companies, institutions) behave and how regulation works
He shows us the human connections of the various marine biological populations: markets, technology, and regulations affect the productivity of one species (e.g. herring) which changes the availability of bait and therefore impacts the lobster harvest. So groundfish, herring, and lobster are connected not only ecologically and environmentally, but also economically and via human systems (markets, technology, and regulation).
How will climate change affect living resources and fisheries governance in the Northwest Atlantic? Scientists, economists, policymakers, and journalists talk about the challenges of public communication and public policy in the face of scientific uncertainty and unpredictable change.
About the Institute
Hosted by the Center for Law & Innovation at the University of Maine School of Law, home to the Marine Law Institute. The Center and Institute support Maine's traditional and innovative industries through legal research, education and service.
