The Premium of Marine Protected Areas: A Simple Valuation Model

Marine Protected Areas are considered as a hedging tool against some of the uncertainties that trouble many fisheries today. Such tools are always connected with a cost; a premium. An optimal harvest rule is combined with a protected area to manage a fishery. The model ignores uncertainty, and is thus ideal to analyze the induced cost arising from protected areas. We address the premium by comparing settings where only an optimal harvesting policy is implemented and where the combined management tool is used. The premium is found to be increasing and convex as a function of the degree of protection. Concepts of relative growth efficiency, relative biological gain, and biological efficiency are all introduced to increase the understanding of the management tool and its effects on the bioeconomic system. Time series solutions show that the net return per unit of fish increases after the protected area is established.