The future for Hawaiʻi’s marine aquarium fishery: A cost benefit analysis compared to an environmental impact assessment

Abstract Conflict has surrounded Hawaiʻi's commercial marine aquarium fishery since its inception in the late 1940s. In 2019, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court requested that an environmental impact statement (EIS) analysing the ecological and cultural impacts of Hawaiʻi's marine aquarium fishery be completed for Hawaiʻi Island (Big Island) and Oʻahu. The costs and benefits associated with the fishery and their distribution across stakeholder groups was however not addressed in the EIS. This paper presents a cost-benefit based analysis of four policy scenarios using existing secondary data for Hawaiʻi's marine aquarium fishery. From the analysis, a state-wide collection ban was the option that yielded positive annual net benefits and negatively impacted the fewest stakeholders. In contrast, the EIS recommends ten permits for fishing off the coast of Big Island be issued.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Marine Policy

• Publication date

  2021-05-01

• Fields of study

  Geography, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/J.MARPOL.2021.104429
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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