Abstract
Nature-based tourism is often advocated as a desirable conservation strategy for small-scale fishing communities as it gives local people motivation to protect wildlife and ecosystems that attract visitors, while benefiting the community. However, valuation of environmental inputs in nature-based tourism, for instance charismatic species or scenic amenities, needs to be done correctly. Often, there are inter-sectoral costs and benefits involved that are not counted, so that determining the value of the environmental inputs to local communities may be more complex than simpler calculations might indicate. We model whales as an input to the production of wildlife viewing trips, but recognize that this occurs within a community dependent on a seasonal fishery. Standard theory suggests that industry will switch from fishing to whale watching every year when whale watching becomes marginally more profitable than fishing. We develop a simple theoretical model that allows us to analyze the interaction between the extractive and the non-extractive activities. As a case study, we use whale watching in the small coastal communities of the Bahía Magdalena lagoon complex in Baja, México.
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Notes
The fishing activity is approximated by shrimp fishing for two reasons. First, shrimp fishing is the most profitable fishery in the Bay and therefore the next best alternative to whale watching, and therefore a good measure of the opportunity cost of whale watching. Second, from a seasonal perspective shrimp fishing precedes whale watching. Note that participants require permits for both whale watching and fishing; the former are limited, while normally the latter are not.
The National Commission for Aquaculture and Fisheries (CONAPESCA) is a decentralized federal body in charge of the management of Mexican fisheries and aquaculture resources. The responsibility is shared with state governments and municipalities.
According to the OECD Review on Fisheries (2003) and in reference to shrimp fisheries in México, “the most important fishing zone is concentrated in the states around the California Gulf at the Pacific Ocean (Baja California, Baja California Sur, Sonora and Sinaloa) with a second zone in the Gulf of Mexico located in the states of Tamaulipas and Campeche. The fishery as a whole is considered utilized at its maximum sustainable level”.
Our model only deals with within-season dynamics of the fishery and we are assuming that each season the fishery is subject to some quota-regulation. If the quota is an equilibrium quota (any quota at which harvest and natural reproduction of the resource are equal), the biomass will remain constant and the regulated fishery will be in a full steady state.
The presence of whales will be measured by an index of instantaneous abundance, that is, an index of instantaneous whale population density.
This is consistent with the shape of whale abundance graphs for adult whales counted in Laguna San Ignacio during the 2007–2018 winter seasons reported in Urbán et al. (2018).
When more whales are present in the Bay they tend to be closer and easier to locate and, consequently, operators require less fuel (Pérez-Cortés 2005).
Note that the overlap between both activities over time is not something that will always take place. Imagine, for example, a situation where the total allowable catch of shrimp is set at a very low level so that the fishing season ends before a substantial number of whales enters the Bay.
We will implicitly assume, for the sake of simplicity, that the total allowable catch of shrimp is not high enough as to give the option to return to fishing from whale watching.
Note that \(\frac{\partial }{\partial t}\left( \frac{{{t}^{2}}}{2}\left( {\bar{T}}+{{t}_{0}} \right) -\frac{{{t}^{3}}}{3}-t{\bar{T}}{{t}_{0}} \right) =\left( {\bar{T}}-t \right) \left( t-{{t}_{0}} \right) \). Thus, Eq. (22) would be the result of measuring in continuous time the whale watching rents for the cases in which \(W'\ge {\bar{W}}\). In the case in which \(W'< {\bar{W}}\), Eq. (22) would overestimate the benefits of the whale watching industry due to the fact that once reached \(W_{t}=W'\) further increases in the abundance of whales will not result in reductions of searching costs.
Note that the distribution and scale of these fixed costs does not affect how changes in whale abundance influence the duration and rents associated with the two economic activities.
Rosales-Nanduca et al. (2013) conduct photographic identification surveys during the 2012 winter in the Bahía Magdalena lagoon complex and identify 275 individual whales visiting the entire complex over the entire season of which 234 were single whales and 41 were mother–calf pairs. The whales with longest residence time (duration of stay) inside the lagoon complex were mother–calf pairs, with the longest residence time of 27 days and an average residence time of 3.9 days. The longest residence time of a single whale was 7 days and the average residence time was 1.2 days.
There are one or two operators in Puerto San Carlos who exclusively do tourism and whale watching and do not fish at present, but they represent a small share of the trips taken.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank seminar participants at the 8th Bi-Annual Conference of AERNA (Madrid, 2018), 6th World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists (Gothemburg, 2018) and the 92nd Annual Conference of the Western Economic Association International (San Diego, 2017) for their helpful comments. We remain responsible for any errors. Alberto Ansuategi thanks financial support from the Ministerio de Economa y Competitividad (ECO-2015-68023) and the Eusko Jaurlaritza (IT-799-13 and MV-2017-1-0008).
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Ansuategi, A., Knowler, D., Schwoerer, T. et al. Local Fishing Communities and Nature-Based Tourism in Baja, México: An Inter-sectoral Valuation of Environmental Inputs. Environ Resource Econ 74, 33–52 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-018-00308-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-018-00308-5