Swedish no-take zones for fishing from an economic perspective – an empirical analysis

This report is an economic cost-benefit analysis for each of the five no-take zones for fishing set up in Sweden, namely, Gålö south of Stockholm, Storjungfrun-Kalvhararna outside Söderhamn, Havstensfjord, Vinga and southern Kattegat. The aim has been to the extent possible, quantify the benefits and costs associated with these no-take areas. Some benefits and costs have not currently been possible to quantifying and those have been given a qualitative description. The introduction of no-take zones for fishing focuses primarily on managing fish stocks for recreation and commercial fishing, where the focus is on the management of specific target, but the introduction can also affect economic benefits and costs that are not directly linked to fishing, for example positive impacts on biodiversity and the improvement of the ability to generate ecosystem services. Therefore the report presents an analysis of ecosystem services and focus on the socio-economic benefits of these potential improvements to bring to the community at large and for specific interest groups. In the report, it is easy to focus interest on the benefits and costs that can, with varying accuracy, be quantified monetarily. This may create a false sense of precision in net results for the various fishing areas. For example, the value of ecosystem values mentioned above can be significant, while they can only be expressed qualitatively. Further, there is significant uncertainty in the biological basis and the economic estimates. To take this into account to some extent this analysis has been made in the form of a scenario analysis with four scenarios for each area. To this has been added a sensitivity analysis for certain key parameters. One significant uncertainty in the economic estimates relate to the spatial population effects, i.e. how far the substitutional effects of a no-fishing zone extends. An extreme case would be they recreational fishermen who used to fish in the closed area will not increase their fishing in other areas. Another extreme case would mean that the reduction of fishing days as a consequence of the no-take zone is not matched by equally large increases in related areas. The real impact we have in this study not been able to analyze.