The Plan to Cap and Trade Whales

Apparently, quitting whale hunting cold turkey just isn't workable. The International Whaling Commission's outright moratorium on commercial whaling that went into effect in 1986 hasn't managed to end the practice—whaling countries like Japan either continue to allow whale hunting under the auspices of "scientific research," or by just leaving the the IWC in protest as Iceland did. Despite the ban, whaling has actually doubled in the last 20 years.

So instead of banning the practice outright, environmental scientists at Arizona State University and University of California, Santa Barbara explore creating a cap-and-trade market for whales in a paper published in Ecological Applications. In such a market, conservationists and "resource extractors"—whale hunters—could pay for and trade property rights on whales.

Under their proposed plan, Erik Stokstad at Science explains, a central authority would set a cap on the number of whales that can be harvested, and then sell shares or permits to people who want to pay for the right to kill a whale. Environmental groups could buy rights and then not use them.

In theory, the market price of the rights could make selling the rights a more lucrative endeavor than harvesting a whale, so the whalers can sell their rights to conservationists, who buy them for less than the cost of their campaigns to "Save the Whales."

So the whalers are paid, whales and money are saved, and the whale population is managed responsibly, staving off extinction. The plan is reflective of the economics of conservation: Terrible a reality as it is, it's easier to make money by exploiting a species than protecting it. So if such a marketplace is run correctly—and theoretically, that's possible—everybody wins right?

Well, theory is one thing, reality is another. A companion paper published in the same journal, written by economists and environmental scientists, points out that legalizing commercial whaling also creates a marketplace for whale products, and brings back the (never totally gone) practice of internationally traded whale meat. There is a belief that legitimate hunting whets the global appetite for wild animal products, the demand for which could create a whale meat black market—and regulators would be faced with the difficult task of distinguishing licensed whale meat from poached.

Their paper also points out that the anti-whaling NGOs would have to change their mission and raise funds to buy permits, which at least in the short term might raise their costs. And there's also the issue of regulating the practice by monitoring whales and their territory, which is to say, a massive amount of ocean—not to mention the issue of actual enforcement. Remember, while there's been some movement, Japan's whale harvest has continued for years despite plenty of evidence that it's not for scientific purposes.

That's where the IWC's whaling moratorium got tripped up. The whale cap and trade marketplace plan relies on a "central authority," but the existent example of a worldwide central authority on whaling is a fairly toothless one. If a country doesn't like what the ICW rules state, then they can just leave, or ignore that regulation. What's to stop someone from ignoring the need for a whale share?

It's an ongoing debate that has echos of almost any banned behavior, from poaching to illicit substances. Is the great, which in the eyes of the anti-whalers would be the end of whaling completely, the enemy of the good—regulated, responsible whaling? And even if a whale cap-and-trade market is theoretically feasible, who would ever enforce it?