Plastic pollution has emerged as a global challenge necessitating collective efforts to mitigate its adverse environmental consequences.International negotiations are currently underway to establish a global plastic treaty.Emphasizing the need for solution-orientated research, rather than focusing on further defining the problems of widespread environmental occurrence and ecological impacts, this paper extracts insights and draws key patterns that are relevant for these international negotiations.The analysis reveals that (i) environmental rather than human health concerns have been the predominant driving force behind previous regulations targeting pollutants, and (ii) the decision to ban or discontinue the use of harmful pollutants is primarily affected by the availability of viable substitutes.These two key findings are relevant to the discussions of the ongoing Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) on the global plastic treaty and underscore the recognition of environmental consequences associated with plastic pollution while emphasizing the need to enhance the knowledge base of potential human health risks.Leveraging the availability of substitutes can significantly contribute to the development and implementation of effective strategies aimed at reducing plastic usage and corresponding pollution.
This article analyses the challenges of different live-feed regimes for the rearing of marine finfish larvae and discusses the potential alternative live feeds to avert a future live-feed trap. Live feeds are indispensable for the successful rearing of larvae of most marine fish species. Brine shrimps (Artemia) and rotifers comprise the live feeds of choice in marine aquaculture today. However, their nutritional composition is deficient in especially essential fatty acids, and enrichment with fish oil is needed. Fish oil is considered a limited resource owing to its origin in fully exploited wild fish stocks. Moreover, fluctuations of the natural population of Artemia will, most likely, influence future availability and prices. This emphasizes the need for optimal exploitation of available live-feed resources and development of new sustainable alternatives, such as copepods. An array of solutions to these problems are presented to avoid a future live-feed trap and to reduce dependence on limited resources that influence future production possibilities, species diversification, price volatility and productivity in the aquaculture sector.
In 2017, the government of Norway introduced a new regulation, the Traffic Light System (TLS), which divides the Norwegian coast into 13 aquaculture production zones and labels them Red, Yellow, and Green based on the sea lice induced mortality rates in the wild stock. Production capacity should be reduced by 6% for Red zones and remain constant for Yellow zones; whereas Green zones may increase their production. Employing unique data from this policy experiment, we investigate the impacts of group output regulation–a threat of forced collective output reduction as a punishment or a promise of possible production increment as an incentive–on environmental and economic outcomes. Using regression discontinuity in time design, we show that the TLS as a blanket group output regulation did reduce the prevalence of sea lice in all production zones. Difference-in-difference estimations show that a greater reduction in the prevalence of sea lice is observed in Red zones compared to Yellow zones suggesting punishment may outperform incentive. Evidence from additional sources indicates that the introduction of the TLS has resulted in cost inefficiency.
During the last three decades, aquaculture has been the fastest growing animal-food-producing sector in the world, accounting for half of the present seafood supply. However, there is a significant growth disparity among aquaculture-producing countries. The reasons why some countries have achieved remarkable growth in aquaculture while others have stagnated or even declined have not been determined. In this article, we investigate whether environmental regulations have an impact on aquaculture growth. Using a cross-country regression analysis, we show that stringent environmental regulations are negatively related to aquaculture growth, whereas GDP growth has a positive effect. Countries often face a difficult balancing act between growth and environmental considerations when devising regulations. Our empirical results suggest that stricter environmental regulations in developed countries have contributed to lower growth rates and that these countries are falling behind emerging and developing economies that have more lenient environmental regulations.
Although the contingent valuation literature emphasizes the importance of controlling for respondents' consequentiality perceptions, this literature has rarely accounted for the difference between payment and policy consequentiality. We examine the influence of a randomly assigned tax amount on consequentiality self-reports and their potential endogeneity using data from a single dichotomous choice survey about reducing marine plastic pollution in Norway. Results show that consequentiality perceptions are a function of the tax amount, with payment consequentiality decreasing and policy consequentiality increasing with higher tax amounts. We discuss the challenge of finding valid instruments to address the potential endogeneity of consequentiality perceptions.
Several countries have imposed either a ban or a tax on single-use plastic packaging, motivated by their contribution to marine plastic pollution. This may lead consumers to opt for similar unregulated substitutes, potentially undermining or even counteracting the intended effect of the policy instrument. The purpose of this study is to theoretically and empirically compare the environmental and welfare effects of the first-best Pigouvian taxes on both plastic bags and a substitute (paper bags), with two alternative second-best policy instruments: a tax on plastic products alone, and a common uniform tax on all packaging materials. The empirical analysis accounts for two different types of environmental externalities from the use of both bag types: marine pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. It also compares results for two countries, Denmark and the USA, which differ in the demand for plastic and paper bags. The theoretical analysis shows that a unilateral tax on plastic bags should equal the marginal environmental damage of plastic bags minus a fraction of the marginal environmental cost of paper bags, hence being lower than the Pigouvian tax. The optimal common tax should equal a weighted average of the marginal environmental damage of the two bag types and would be lower than the Pigouvian tax on plastics if the marginal external cost of plastic bags exceeds that for paper bags. The empirical analysis shows that for default parameters, the variation in tax level across the studied scenarios is small. It also shows that if Pigouvian taxes cannot be implemented, a common uniform tax on both bag types would result in a higher welfare gain than a tax on plastic bags alone. Sensitivity analysis reveals that the level of the second-best taxes and their associated environmental and welfare impacts are sensitive to assumptions regarding the littering rate and decay rate of plastic bags in the marine environment.
'%3e%3ccircle r='20' fill='%23008'/%3e%3ccircle r='17.5' fill='%23fff'/%3e%3ccircle r='3.5' fill='%23008'/%3e%3cg id='d'%3e%3cg id='c'%3e%3cg id='b'%3e%3cg id='a' fill='%23008'%3e%3ccircle r='.875' transform='rotate(7.5 -8.75 133.5)'/%3e%3cpath d='M0 17.5.6 7 0 2l-.6 5L0 17.5z'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23a' transform='rotate(15)'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23b' transform='rotate(30)'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23c' transform='rotate(60)'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23d' transform='rotate(120)'/%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23d' transform='rotate(-120)'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)
