The idea is that whalers might make more money by selling their permits to environmentalists than by actually killing the whales. In principle, they argued, a central authority could set a maximum harvest level, then offer shares or permits to anyone who wanted to buy the right to kill-including environmental groups that would have no intention of using the permit. Gerber, along with Chris Costello and Steven Gaines of the University of California, Santa Barbara, first proposed applying similar market-based ideas to whaling in January 2012. And a cap-and-trade system for trading pollution permits was a clear success in controlling acid rain. Setting up a system of controlled fishing permits-known as catch shares-has helped protect fisheries. "The paper succeeds in shifting the dialogue about whaling, and actually modeling the crucial dynamic between whaling and conservation," says Stephen Palumbi of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. They argue it also could be a model for helping turtles, sharks, and seabirds. In an article in Ecological Applications, Leah Gerber of Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe, and colleagues spell out how this controversial idea would benefit both whales and whalers. But critics of the "whale shares" idea have already sharpened their harpoons. Now several researchers are proposing a possible solution: Create a cap-and-trade market for swapping permits to kill or conserve whales. ![]() The International Whaling Commission (IWC) appears stuck on developing new conservation agreements. The number of whales killed by whalers has doubled since the 1990s, with so-called scientific whaling claiming roughly 1000 annually, and perhaps 600 more captured by scofflaw nations. The world banned most whaling in 1986, but sometimes it's hard to tell.
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