Go fish: property rights.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Report on rights-based fishery management reforms - Citings - Brief article

"Rights-based fishery management" reforms would boost the annual global catch by 16 million metric tons over current levels, according to a March report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That essentially means giving property rights to fishers or fishing communities, thus creating an incentive to protect and grow fish populations rather than plundering them from an open-access commons.

The researchers, led by University of California, Santa Barbara environmental scientist Christopher Costello, evaluated data from 4,713 fisheries around the world, representing 78 percent of the globe's reported fish...