There are certain measures that increase the availability of the resource, such as the rebuilding strategies I've talked about; then there are other measures that mesh with them that protect biodiversity and protect the larger ecosystems. Enclosed areas like national parks are part of that strategy.
Another strategy I mentioned that would protect biodiversity is changes to fishing gear to make it less destructive. For example, on Georges Bank, due to the U.S. law there was a restriction on fishing haddock—which is rebuilding, as I said—because there was a bycatch of cod. So there was incentive for fishermen, in order to not be shut down because of the bycatch issue, to change their gear in a way that would avoid bycatch. This they did with a separator panel that basically chucks out all the cod and other things and provides almost pure haddock catch. That's a simple technological solution to a problem that has been lingering for a while, but there had been no incentive to solve it, because there was no clear, hard and fast rule to rebuild cod and haddock at the same time, as there is now.
I want to give you an example of benefits flowing to fishing communities. I think it's a striking one. This concerns the lobster fishery in New Zealand, which in a particular part of New Zealand was depleted, and the stock was in trouble. The scientific advice was to reduce the quota and let the stock rebuild to safe levels again. Fishermen were opposed to that because they didn't see the benefits of it flowing to them. Their thinking was, in five years I may not be in the fishery any more; somebody else will reap the benefit. They transformed that to a catch share system, whereby every fisherman got a particular share of the catch guaranteed. That catch share was tradeable, and at that point the market valued it at $50,000 per tonne—which is not a lot, in the big scheme of things—because the fishery was so depleted that it wasn't worth much.
Under that regime, they actually pushed for a reduction to the total allowable catch, which led to a rebuilding of the resource. Only three years later, their share had increased from $50,000 to $250,000 on the market, which means their asset had increased fivefold because of proper management. That set up a cascade of similar measures around New Zealand, because people were seeing that it makes economic sense to rebuild, if you are guaranteed to reap the benefits through, for example, a catch share system. This doesn't have to be an individual catch share; it could also be a cooperative or community catch share.
That's what has been working there. Those are economic benefits realized in a very quick time. To have in just three years a fivefold increase in the value of your share is an enormous return on the “investment”, if you will. That's one example.
Often, these measures, as in the Georges Bank example—the closed areas put in to protect haddock and other stocks—come with biodiversity benefits; for example, scallops, flounder, even sharks rebuilding under that scenario.