Monetising fisheries provisioning services from multispecies fisheries in ecosystem accounts: introducing rent revenue shares

Central to the SEEA-EA (System of Environmental Economic Accounts – Ecosystem Accounts) is the concept of an exchange value, which is used to measure the value of the ecosystem contribution (i.e., the ecosystem service) to the associated economic activity. SEEA-EA proposes a number of approaches to value these services. These approaches have largely been developed with a terrestrial focus, and their application to the marine environment has been limited. Of interest in this study is the attribution of the value of fisheries biomass provisioning services to multispecies fisheries. Many fisheries straddle several ecosystems, and in the case of multispecies fisheries, the combination of species may change across these different ecosystems. While the ecosystem service in quantity terms (i.e., the retained harvest) can be readily measured, identifying the exchange value of this catch is more complex. In this study, we consider a number of different SEEA-EA recommended approaches to estimate ecosystem service exchange prices for individual species and compare their implications for the derived ecosystem contributions for multispecies fisheries. We use an Australian multispecies fishery as a case study and assess the implications of the different assumptions on the resultant distribution of ecosystem service value. We find that the use of the annualised average vessel value of total quota holdings or licence value divided by the vessel revenue provides the most appropriate means to derive ecosystem service exchange prices and exchange values for individual species within the multispecies fishery. We have called this approach “rent revenue share”.