Minke whale kabob served up at the Sea Baron restaurant in Reykjavik Harbour area, Iceland. Photo by:Thjurexoell.
How do you end a decades-long conflict between culture and conservation? How do you stop a conflict where both sides are dug in? A new paper in Nature proposes a way to end the long and bitter battle over whaling: environmentalists could pay whalers not to whale.
The idea proposes a marketing scheme in which a quota of whales would be sold to whalers. The key, however, is that environmental groups or wealthy conservation-minded individuals could also purchase quotas, essentially saving individual whales from whalers. The authors calculated that the life of a minke whale would cost around $13,000 and a fin whale around $85,000, prices, they say, that are within the reach of a number of conservation organizations. According to the study, whaling is a $31 million industry, while environmental groups spend at least $25 million on anti-whaling campaigns and activities. Under a new market scheme such funds could instead go to “buy” whales from whalers.
Although whaling was banned in 1982, today commercial whaling is conducted by Japan, Norway and Iceland, each of which has found a way to circumvent the moratorium. All told around 1,600 whales are hunted annually by the three nations. Additionally a few hundred whales are hunted by indigenous groups annually.
It’s unclear how attractive such a quota market would be to either environmentalists commercial whalers. For environmentalists the idea would require re-legalizing whaling even in a restricted sense, something they may not be able to stomach. While, for whaling nations, the agreement may mean an inevitable end to whaling altogether as quotas are bought out.
CITATION: Christopher Costello, Steven Gaines, and Leah R. Gerber. Conservation science: A market approach to saving the whales. Nature 481, 139–140. 2012. doi:10.1038/481139a.
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