Dale Squires

• Ph.D.
• Senior Researcher at Southwest Fisheries Science Center

Fisheries bycatch is one of the biggest threats to marine mammal populations and an important conservation and management problem worldwide. Conventional marine mammal bycatch mitigation approaches typically rely on top-down, command-and-control regulations that often fail to create desired incentives for fishers to avoid bycatch. There is growing...

The world faces major risks in ensuring the sustainability and on-going socio-economic benefits from its marine capture fisheries (MCFs). Key drivers of risks for MCFs include: overharvesting, bycatch, illegal fishing, habitat loss and damage, climate change, and marine pollution. These risks threaten the livelihoods of the hundreds of millions of...

The effectiveness of behavioural interventions in conservation often depends on local resource users' underlying social interactions. However, it remains unclear to what extent differences in related topics of information shared between resource users can alter network structure—holding implications for information flows and the spread of behaviour...

Multispecies aggregations of tuna, dolphins, and seabirds are prevalent and conspicuous in the vast waters of the eastern tropical Pacific and form the basis of a commercial fishery for yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) through setting on schools of dolphins, which is among the largest tuna fisheries in the world. Incidental dolphin mortality asso...

The Upper Gulf of California is a diverse and highly productive ecosystem supporting some of the most important fisheries in Mexico, yet a history of weak fisheries management and illegal fishing threaten the area’s biodiversity and undermine human well-being in the communities along its shores. The vaquita (Phocoena sinus) is endemic to these wate...

Understanding wildlife markets is central to effective conservation: it can help managers and policy‐makers to predict how interventions might influence supply and demand of wildlife products, and economic welfare of wildlife users; and thus, design interventions which have better outcomes for wildlife and people. Here we apply a revealed preferenc...

Credit systems for mitigation of bycatch and habitat impact, incentive-based approaches, incentivize changes in fishery operator behavior and decision-making and allow flexibility in a least-cost method. Three types of credit systems, originally developed to address environmental pollution, are presented and evaluated as currently underutilized inc...

Economic activities in the ocean (that is, the ‘blue economy’) provide value to society, yet also jeopardize marine ecosystems. For example, fisheries are an essential source of income and food security for billions of people, yet bycatch poses a major threat to marine biodiversity, creating trade-offs between economic growth and biodiversity conse...

Fisheries bycatch conservation and management can be analyzed and implemented through the biodiversity mitigation hierarchy using one of four basic approaches: (1) private solutions, including voluntary, moral suasion, and intrinsic motivation; (2) direct or “command-and-control” regulation starting from the fishery management authority down to the...

The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) is responsible for managing highly migratory species in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO), and has been interested in managing bigeye tuna as stock assessments prior to 2017 indicated that the stock was experiencing overfishing. This paper provides some background on the primar...

This article examines the structure and performance of conservation agreements, which are relational contracts used across the world to protect natural resources. Key elements of these agreements are (1) they are ongoing arrangements between a local community and an outside party, typically a nongovernmental organization (NGO); (2) they feature pay...

The mitigation hierarchy has been proposed as an overarching framework for managing fisheries and reducing marine megafauna bycatch, but requires empirical application to show its practical utility. Focusing on a small-scale fishing community in Peru as a case study system, we test how the mitigation hierarchy can support efforts to reduce captures...

Sharks and their cartilaginous relatives are one of the world's most threatened species groups. The primary cause is overfishing in targeted and bycatch fisheries. Reductions in fishing mortality are needed to halt shark population declines. However, this requires complex fisheries management decisions, which often entail trade‐offs between conserv...

Researchers and decision-makers lack a shared understanding of resilience, and practical applications in environmental resource management are rare. Here, we define social-ecological resilience as a property of social-ecological systems that includes at least three main characteristics — resistance, recovery and robustness (the ‘three Rs’). We defi...

This paper estimates the price changes in global bluefin tuna (BFT) markets in response to shifts in regional and global landings to evaluate the conservation and economic incentives from changes in the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) managed by all three Regional Fisheries Management Organizations. A fisherman’s income, and thus the financial incentiv...

In July 2015, the Council of the International Seabed Authority ( ISA ) adopted seven priority deliverables for the development of the exploitation code. The first priority was the development of a zero draft of the exploitation regulations. This article focusses on the second priority deliverable, namely the development of a payment mechanism for...

This chapter examines the issue of developing deep-sea mining (DSM) while managing the impact upon deep seabed environmental assets. It reviews pertinent background information relating to DSM and the environment; develops a suite of potential policy instruments, including both direct and incentive-based regulation; develops additional incentive-ba...

To what degree might an anticipated policy change delay the fleet restructuring process initiated by a vessel buyback? This paper addresses the issue by estimating a restricted profit function to analyze an overcapitalized fishing fleet subject to restrictive regulation on the harvest of its primary target species. Fishermen’s expectations and like...

Least-cost implementation of the mitigation hierarchy of impacts on biodiversity minimizes the cost of a given level of biodiversity conservation, at project or ecosystem levels, and requires minimizing costs across and within hierarchy steps. Incentive-based policy instruments that price biodiversity to alter producer and consumer behavior and dec...

This paper considers fisheries bycatch reduction within the least-cost biodiversity impact mitigation hierarchy. It introduces conservatory offsets that are implemented earlier in the biodiversity impact mitigation hierarchy than conventional compensatory offsets used as instruments of last resort. The paper illustrates implementation in an on-goin...

The commons problem is even more severe than standard economic analysis suggests due to accumulated and new technology accompanied by spillovers of nonrival knowledge, creating a second market failure. The resulting endogenous dynamic increasing returns to scale external to producers that create endogenous growth of production lead to ongoing and a...

This paper considers fisheries bycatch reduction within the least-cost biodiversity impact mitigation hierarchy. It introduces conservatory offsets that are implemented earlier in the biodiversity impact mitigation hierarchy than conventional compensatory offsets used as instruments of last resort. The paper illustrates implementation in an on-goin...

Polymetallic nodules found in the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone in the NE Pacific contain more nickel, manganese and cobalt than all terrestrial reserves combined. Following the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention and its 1994 Implementing Agreement, the resources of the international seabed beyond the limits of national jurisdiction will be develope...

In terrestrial and coastal systems, the mitigation hierarchy is widely and increasingly used to guide actions to ensure that no net loss of biodiversity ensues from development. We develop a conceptual model which applies this approach to the mitigation of marine megafauna by-catch in fisheries, going from defining an overarching goal with an assoc...

Tuna products are amongst the most popular seafoods in the world and widely traded across the globe. Their global trade developed at a very early stage in the growth and development of tuna fisheries. In this article, recent evolutions of tuna markets in terms of products (for both sashimi and cannery-grade tuna products), market structures, and tr...

The development of mineral resources in the deep sea can potentially generate significant economic returns, but also raises governance challenges. The International Seabed Authority (ISA) wrestles with a wide range of issues and complex interactions that may affect not only how the industry develops over time, but also how development will benefit...

There is an urgent need for developing policy-relevant future scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services. This paper is a milestone toward this aim focusing on open ocean fisheries. We develop five contrasting Oceanic System Pathways (OSPs), based on the existing five archetypal worlds of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) developed for cli...

This study estimates consumer demand for eco-friendly labeled canned tuna products in two distinct US marketing channels, conventional and natural supermarkets, to evaluate market-based incentives for conservation measures that affect fishing costs and retail prices. Using retail scanner data, this paper finds that US consumer demand for canned tun...

This paper evaluates industry-wide economic incentives arising from changes in product prices in an industry exploiting a common renewable resource under public regulation that sets total sustainable conservation targets. Changes in prices alter economic incentives through impacts upon revenues, profits, conservation, and nonmarket public benefits....

The broader ecosystem impacts of fishing continue to present a challenge to scientists and resource managers around the world. Bycatch is of greatest concern for marine mammals, for which fishery bycatch and entanglement is the number one cause of direct mortality. Climate change will only add to the challenge, as marine species and fishing practic...

As domestic affluence increases, nations advocate for conservation policies to protect domestic biodiversity that often curtail natural resource production activities such as fishing. If concomitant consumption patterns remain unchanged, environmentally conscious nations with high consumption rates such as the U.S. may only be distancing themselves...

Effort rights-based fisheries management (RBM) is less widely used than catch rights, whether for groups or individuals. Because RBM on catch or effort necessarily requires a total allowable catch (TAC) or total allowable effort (TAE), RBM is discussed in conjunction with issues in assessing fish populations and providing TACs or TAEs. Both approac...

This publication reports on a multidisciplinary workshop that evaluated rights-based conservation and management of marine fisheries by fishing effort, and more broadly management by regulating effort rather than catch. This publication includes a synthesis of the workshop results and conclusions, workshop presentations on conceptual issues and cas...

“Economics of fisheries” is a field of economic research that has developed since the mid-1950s. The core of the research in its early stage was to find conditions for optimal exploitation of fish stocks over time. The purpose is to inform policymakers about harvest levels that maximize net present value of the fish stock. At the same time, the fun...

Following a precise evaluation protocol that was applied to a pool of 202 articles published between 2003 and 2014, this paper evaluates the existing evidence of how and to what extent capture fisheries and aquaculture contribute to improving nutrition, food security, and economic growth in developing and emergent countries. In doing so we evaluate...

Maximum economic yield (MEY) can be extended along two dimensions beyond the common resource stock externality: (1) the appropriate measurement of costs and benefits and (2) extending MEY beyond the relationship between the harvest sector and the resource stock externality. Only when all economic distortions are accounted for and valued by economic...

Maximum economic yield (MEY) can be extended along two dimensions beyond the common resource stock externality: (1) the appropriate measurement of costs and benefits and (2) extending MEY beyond the relationship between the harvest sector and the resource stock externality. Only when all economic distortions are accounted for and valued by economic...

Productivity growth substantially impacts rent-maximizing resource stocks, and can lead to an economic optimum that has overfished stocks: BMEY<BMSY. Bioeconomic models can give biased results and policy advice when not accounting for time-varying catchability—notably due to productivity growth—and density-dependent catchability, and not distinguis...

The theory of virtual quantities, the dual to virtual prices, provides a framework to analyze competitive multiproduct firm behavior under multiple quantity controls on inputs and outputs, including command-and-control quotas and transferable property rights. The framework addresses the firm’s reactions to regulatory controls, impacts of adding or...

Productivity is a key economic indicator that measures the relationship between inputs used to produce a product, and the amount of product produced. Productivity change measures how productivity has changed through time. In traditional land based industries, these two economic metrics have been extensively measured and studied. Until recently, thi...

We model conservation agreements using contractual equilibrium, a concept intro-duced by Miller and Watson (2010) to model dynamic relationships with renegotiation. The setting takes the form of a repeated principal-agent problem, where the principal must pay to observe a noisy signal of the agent's effort. Lacking a strong external en-forcement sy...

Covering more than half the planet, the deep ocean sequesters atmospheric CO2 and recycles major nutrients; is predicted to hold millions of yet-to-be-described species; and stores mind-boggling quantities of untapped energy resources, precious metals, and minerals (1). It is an immense, remote biome, critical to the health of the planet and human...

Fisheries economics stand on the cusp of potentially sizeable changes in orientation and policy focus, leading in turn to comparable changes in modeling and general analysis. Notably, fisheries are increasingly framed as part of the overall marine environment rather than considered as solely or largely a commercial fishing issue. Other changes furt...

We critique a proposal to use catch shares to manage transboundary wildlife resources with potentially high non-extractive values, and we focus on the case of whales. Because whales are impure public goods, a policy that fails to capture all nonmarket benefits (due to free riding) could lead to a suboptimal outcome. Even if free riding were overcom...

Several tuna regional fisheries management organizations (t-RFMOs) have adopted retention requirements for skipjack, bigeye and yellowfin tunas caught by purse seine vessels to reduce discards, create disincentives to catch small fish, and incentivize the development and adoption of more selective technologies. Although retention policies in the t-...

Although holistic conservation addressing all sources of mortality for endangered species or stocks is the preferred conservation strategy, limited budgets require a criterion to prioritize conservation investments. We compared the cost-effectiveness of nesting site and at-sea conservation strategies for Pacific leatherback turtles (Dermochelys cor...

Asian's remarkable economic growth brought many benefits but also fuelled threats to its ecosystems and biodiversity. Economic growth brings biodiversity threats but also conservation opportunities. Continued biodiversity loss is inevitable, but the types, areas and rates of biodiversity loss are not. Prioritising biodiversity conservation, tempere...

This publication reports on a multidisciplinary workshop that evaluated rights-based conservation and management of marine fisheries by fishing effort, and more broadly management by regulating effort rather than catch. This publication includes a synthesis of the workshop results and conclusions, workshop presentations on conceptual issues and...

This paper addresses the normative relationship between changes in technology and technical efficiency and the exploitation of common renewable resources. These changes can exacerbate the commons problem and deepen the externality. Their impact depends on the rate and nature of change, levels of effort and resource stock, and state of property righ...

Technical change in fisheries is an under-researched area in resource economics and management. This is surprising, because technical progress is the main driver of the development in fishing power and capacity. This article reviews the recent research and development in technology that have occurred in fisheries. New policy implications of introdu...

Exploiting variability in the managerial dimension, this paper presents firm management through firm and time effects in a production function that uses a three-way fixed effect model and a unique panel dataset that tracks multiple managers for each firm from 1980–2007. We allow for time-varying firm management through learning. The model is applie...

The fisheries subsidy discussion has largely overlooked the increased welfare for society from Pigouvian subsidies that increase the supply of and investment in public goods when there are external benefits and free riding. Important fisheries public goods and external benefits include knowledge associated with new technology for “target” species a...

Asian's remarkable economic growth brought many benefits but also fuelled threats to its ecosystems and biodiversity. Economic growth brings biodiversity threats but also conservation opportunities. Continued biodiversity loss is inevitable, but the types, areas and rates of biodiversity loss are not. Prioritising biodiversity conservation, tempere...

This article reviews economic concepts for the management of two related renewable resources, fish stocks and water. The authors discuss scarcity and the economics of optimal use that also addresses external costs and benefits and market failure arising from incomplete or weak property rights, issues in optimal use over time, and growing importance...

Exploiting variability in the managerial dimension, this paper presents firm management through firm and time effects in a production function that uses a three-way fixed effect model and a unique panel dataset that tracks multiple managers for each firm from 1980–2007. We allow for time-varying firm management through learning. The model is applie...

This paper develops an approach to simulating markets for individual transferable quotas prior to their actual implementation. This approach is based on linear programming models for individual vessels that allow estimation of market derived demand for quota to simulate the expected equilibrium market price for quota and maximum quasi-rents for alt...

Skipper skill or managerial ability plays a central role in the harvesting of fish and fishing power. Examining the influences of managerial ability on catch rates, however, may be complicated, since managerial ability is generally unobservable. Using panel data on production activities in the Pacific Coast trawl fishery, we examine the use of the...

Across the Pacific, populations of some species of sea turtles face extinction unless recent dramatic declines are reversed. The continuing decline of leatherbacks and loggerheads in particular illustrates the limitations of the current gradual and unilateral approach to conservation. Recovery requires instead a holistic solution that addresses all...

Fisheries provide important food sources to many people around the world and contribute substantially to the livelihoods of coastal communities. In rural coastal areas where sources of income are limited, local communities have for decades and through generations depended extensively on fisheries resources. Developing countries currently supply 70%...

Reconciling sea turtle conservation in the Pacific with continued fishing is essential for recovery of critically endangered sea turtle populations, such as eastern Pacific leatherbacks, because fishing will continue under any likely policy scenario. From a broader perspective, turtle recovery coupled with fishing can be viewed as reconciling biodi...

Performance and technology standards, key features of many international environmental agreements (IEAs) for common and public resources, are policy tools that can contribute to the conservation of Pacific sea turtle populations. Many such standards have been applied in other IEAs, including the conservation of dolphins in the eastern Pacific Ocean...

The threats of incidental catch of sea turtles are widely recognized and are becoming a major issue in fisheries management with increasing studies that record the impacts of fishing operations on sea turtles (Frazier and Montero 1990; Aguilar et al. 1995; Ovaretz 1999; Peckham et al. 2007; Alfaro-Shigueto and Mangel, chapter 15 [this volume]; Yeo...

Buybacks of fishing vessels, licences, access and other rights, and gear, sometimes called decommissioning schemes, have traditionally been a key policy tool to address overcapacity, overexploitation of fish stocks, and distributional issues in fisheries. Two more issues can be added, sustainable use of ecosystems and conservation of biodiversity (...

We analyze the effect of technological change on labor and total factor productivity in the Lofoten fishery, using detailed data for 130 years. Our findings support the important role of natural resources in productivity and improvements in welfare in natural resource–based industries. The total factor productivity has risen faster than labor produ...

Overcapacity is a major problem in common-pool resources. Regulators increasingly turn from limited entry to individual transferable use rights to address overcapacity. Using individual vessel data from before and after the introduction of individual harvest rights into a fishery, the paper investigates how characteristics of rights, scale of opera...

Introduction Property Rights Use Rights Characteristics of Property and Use Rights Types of Fishing Rights Concluding Remarks Endnotes References

Buybacks of fishing vessels, licenses or access and other use rights, and gear can be key management tools to address overcapacity, overexploitation of fish stocks, and distributional issues. Buybacks can also contribute to a transition from an open-access fishery to a more rationalized one. As a strategic policy tool, buybacks can help restructure...

Conservation and Management of Transnational Tuna Fisheries reviews and synthesizes the existing literature, focusing on rights-based management and the creation of economic incentives to manage transnational tuna fisheries. Transnational tuna fisheries are among the most important fisheries in the world, and tuna commissions are increasingly shift...

Introduction Essential Issues Entry and Its Deterrence Qualification and Entry Additional Issues Concluding Remarks Endnotes References

The Bycatch Issue Bycatch in the Purse-Seine Fisheries of the Eastern Pacific Ocean Bycatch Examples from the Experience of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission Economic Incentives for Bycatch Reduction Conservation and Management Approaches Concluding Remarks Endnotes References

Although seafood is the most highly traded food internationally, it is an often overlooked component of global food security. It provides essential local food, livelihoods, and export earnings. Although global capture fisheries production is unlikely to increase, aquaculture is growing considerably. Sustaining seafood's contributions to food securi...