Using additional data on EEZ access agreements from the Sea Around Us and the European Union to separate authorized from unauthorized foreign fishing, Englander found that unauthorized foreign fishing is 81% lower just inside EEZs compared to just outside them. “I was really excited to work with this data. “The data contained information on large vessels and their movements in space and time, and Global Fishing Watch applied convolutional neural networks to detect fishing activity from the vessel movement,” he said. In August 2017, however, Global Fishing Watch made a new data set available. “This creates challenges for conducting quality empirical research,” said Englander. Analyzing global fishing activity near the boundary between each nation’s EEZ and the high seas-which no nation has claim to-Englander’s results are the first to demonstrate that assigning property rights across countries leads to the protection of fisheries from unauthorized fishing.Īccording to Englander, data on wildlife can be relatively sparse compared to available datasets on energy consumption or the labor market.

In a study published today in Nature Sustainability, Gabriel Englander, a 5th year PhD Candidate in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, tests whether unauthorized foreign vessels are deterred from fishing inside EEZs.

Without enforcement, unauthorized foreign fishing vessels might not respect other countries’ EEZs, which would undermine the incentive for countries to sustainably manage the fish stocks inside their EEZs. However, EEZs cover large swaths of remote ocean and patrolling their boundaries to prevent unauthorized fishing is very expensive. Since assigning property rights to natural resources has been shown to improve both economical and ecological outcomes, EEZs could be an important tool for improving the sustainability and profitability of global fisheries. More than 95% of global marine fish catch occurs inside EEZs, and countries have the exclusive right to manage and use all natural resources within their EEZ. About 39% of the ocean is covered by Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ), which give nation-level property rights to marine resources, such as fish, oil, and minerals.

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