Seminar on Marine Conservation

Research on marine reserves supports marine conservation.\Photo courtesy of ODFW.

The speaker series at the Hatfield Marine Science Center (HMSC) features one student-invited presenter.  This year it is Christopher Costello, a professor of natural resource economics at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  Dr. Costello’s topic is “New institutions for marine conservation.”  He speaks on Thursday, Feb. 20, 3:30 p.m. in the Guin Library seminar room at HMSC (2030 S.E. Marine Science Dr. in the South Beach area of Newport).

In addition to his professorship, Costello is Director and Sustainable Fisheries Group Co-Director, Environmental Market Solutions Lab (emLab), Professor of Natural Resource Economics, Bren School UCSB, and Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

His description of his talk:  “Most existing marine institutions are ill-equipped for conservation. Much of the ocean is either completely unmanaged, or is heavily regulated with top-down extraction policies that give little autonomy to local communities and other stakeholders to engage in bottom up conservation. This may be one explanation for why ocean conservation is lagging far behind land conservation (despite the much higher cost of the latter). In this talk I propose and examine a practical set of new institutions that are designed to correct these incentive problems and increase marine conservation. This new package of institutions accounts for behavioral responses of resource users, incentives for illegal activity, shifts arising due to climate change, and other real-world factors. I use a range of bioeconomic and empirical tools to design and evaluate these new institutions and show how and where they could be implemented in the real world.”

For a live broadcast via Adobe Connect, visit:  http://oregonstate.adobeconnect.com/hmsc-fw407/.