Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
© The Author(s), 2013. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Journal of King Saud University - Science 25 (2013): 217–228, doi:10.1016/j.jksus.2013.02.006.
Description:
The degradation of natural fish habitat in the ocean implies lost economic benefits. These value losses often are not measured or anticipated fully, and therefore they are mainly ignored in decisions to develop the coast for industrial or residential purposes. In such circumstances, the ocean habitat and its associated ecosystem are treated as if they are worthless. Measures of actual or potential economic values generated by fisheries in commercial markets can be used to assess a conservative (lower-bound) value of ocean habitat. With this information, one can begin to compare the values of coastal developments to the values of foregone ocean habitat in order to help understand whether development would be justified economically. In this paper, we focus on the economic value associated with the harvesting of commercial fish stocks as a relevant case for the Saudi Arabian portion of the Red Sea. We describe first the conceptual basis behind supply-side approaches to economic valuation. Next we review the literature on the use of these methods for valuing ocean habitat. We provide an example based on recent research assessing the bioeconomic status of the traditional fisheries of the Red Sea in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). We estimate the economic value of ecosystem services provided by the KSA Red Sea coral reefs, finding that annual per-unit values supporting the traditional fisheries only are on the order of $7000/km2. Finally, we develop some recommendations for refining future applications of these methods to the Red Sea environment and for further research.
Description:
This research is based on work supported by Award Nos. USA 00002 and KSA 00011 made by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).
Keywords:
Ecosystem service
;
Supply-side valuation
;
Traditional fishery
;
Red Sea
;
Coral reef
;
Bio-economics
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
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