The Persistent Transboundary Problem in Marine Natural Resource Management

Owen R Liu,Renato Molina

doi:10.3389/fmars.2021.656023

Abstract

Shared natural resources are vulnerable to overexploitation. Countries have established national borders on land and exclusive economic zones (EEZs) in the world's oceans in part to better control exploitation of local resources, but transboundary resources—those that span multiple national jurisdictions—are still subject to incentives for overextraction. We investigate the magnitude and distribution of this “transboundary problem” as it manifests in global fisheries. We show that internationally-shared fisheries exhibit lower relative abundance, on average, than those contained in single EEZs, even in the presence of extraction agreements and modern management practices. Additionally, for the first time we show that the degree of sharing—the number of countries sharing a resource and the spatial balance of each country's share—matters in driving the severity of the transboundary problem. Alleviating the transboundary problem for the fisheries we investigate would result in an estimated 4 to 17 million metric tons more fish in the ocean. In the future, growing human demand and climate change will likely exacerbate pressures on transboundary resources, requiring coordinated international governance solutions.

Highlights

When natural resources span international boundaries, competitive incentives between nations can result in overextraction (Munro, 1990; Bailey et al, 2010; Hannesson, 2011)
We find robust and statistically significant evidence that fish stocks spanning multiple exclusive economic zones (EEZs) have lower relative abundance than those contained within single EEZs
Fish stocks shared across multiple EEZs have, on average, a lower B/BMSY than those contained in a single jurisdiction at any given point in time (Figure 2A)

Summary

Introduction

When natural resources span international boundaries, competitive incentives between nations can result in overextraction (Munro, 1990; Bailey et al, 2010; Hannesson, 2011). Countries with access to these transboundary resources have an incentive to capture available economic benefits strategically, and so excessive harvest takes place and the resource becomes overexploited. The introduction of national exclusive economic zones (EEZs) as part of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea was meant in part to give countries more control over “their” marine resources (Hannesson, 2011; Nordquist, 2011). The problem is that borders over water lack actual physical obstacles, and a variety of jurisdictional arrangements arose: resources can be contained in just one EEZ, span two or more EEZs (i.e., transboundary), migrate between EEZ’s and the high seas (known as straddling stocks), or be solely contained in the high seas, outside of any EEZs. Despite the clear limits to access, these marine jurisdictions increased incentives

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