Putting a Price on Sharks

By David Jolly -

Reef sharks, as I noted in an article on Monday about a new study, are worth more in the water than when sold for their fins and meat, at least in some cases.

In Palau, the Maldives, the Bahamas and some other scuba-diving destinations, tourism operators have gotten across the message to governments that there are economically rational reasons to protect the fish.

 Interestingly, the “value approach” to endangered wildlife is catching on. The World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy and Stanford University have been working together to map and value nature on a larger scale around the world with a tool called InVEST. They have projects under way in Belize, Borneo, Colombia, Namibia, Sumatra, Tanzania, and Virunga in the Congo basin.

 As an enthusiastic diver who has visited Palau, I have followed this trend with interest.

 Last week my colleague Bettina Wassener wrote about another  ray of hope for the fish, a growing willingness among Chinese in Hong Kong to forgo shark fin soup as a traditional banquet food. That’s important because China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan consume the vast majority of the world’s shark fin take.

 But over all, the picture for the cartilaginous fishes remains pretty grim. China’s middle class is growing, and even if demand for shark fin declines in relative terms, absolute demand may still grow for some time to come.

 Mark Meekan, the principal research scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science who led the sharkonomics study, told me that Palau is one of the few places in the Pacific where you can still see a pristine reef with the high-order predators present.

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