Building climate resilience, social sustainability and equity in global fisheries

Although the Paris Agreement establishes targets to limit global warming—including carbon market mechanisms—little research has been done on developing operational tools to achieve them. To cover this gap, we use CO₂ permit markets towards a market-based solutions (MBS) scheme to implement blue carbon climate targets for global fisheries. The scheme creates a scarcity value for the right to not sequester blue carbon, generating an asset of carbon sequestration allowances based on historical landings, which are considered initial allowances. We use the scheme to identify fishing activities that could be reduced because they are biologically negative, economically inefficient, and socially unequitable. We compute the annual willingness to sequester carbon considering the CO₂e trading price for 2022 and the social cost of carbon dioxide (SC-CO₂), for years 2025, 2030 and 2050. The application of the MBS scheme will result in 0.122 Gt CO₂e sequestered or US$66 billion of potential benefits per year when considering 2050 SC-CO₂. The latter also implies that if CO₂e trading prices reach the 2050 social cost of carbon, around 75% of the landings worldwide would be more valuable as carbon than as foodstuff in the market. Our findings provide the global economy and policymakers with an alternative for the fisheries sector, which grapples with the complexity to find alternatives to reallocate invested capital. They also provide a potential solution to make climate resilience, social sustainability and equity of global fisheries real, scientific and practical for a wide range of social-ecological and political contexts.

Raul Prellezo, José María Da-Rocha, Maria L. D. Palomares, U. Rashid Sumaila, Sebastian Villasante