Salmon conservation: Does it pay off?

Abstract

Migratory salmonids faces many threats from various sources as hydropower, aquaculture, pollution, invasive species, road and railroad construction, habitat degradation and climate changes. In order to conserve or restore salmon populations, economic benefits associated with the salmon are often mentioned as the reason to put effort and money into conservation. Salmon is an important recreational species and anglers worldwide are attracted to salmon rivers each summer. The direct benefits are quite easily calculated, and usually falls short of the benefits from competing industries, like hydropower and aquaculture production. The direct benefits are what economists label use values. The use value is for example the answer to the question. How much are you willing to pay to fish for salmon in this river. When we aggregate the numbers from all anglers, we are able to calculate the angler (consumer surplus). In addition, we have to take into account the direct spin offs, that is the value of accommodation, guiding, and spending at the local restaurants and shops. In addition, every species on earth are associated with an existence value. This non-use value is the value people put on knowing wild salmon exist, without any intention to ever fish, watch or eat one. Still, the use and non-use values together are not usually enough to compete with the income from for example hydropower and aquaculture production. However, one of the reasons there still are salmon producing rivers is that restrictions are put on such commercial sectors in order to conserve the wild salmon. In Norway, every hydropower producer are required to keep the water flow above a certain threshold, and are in most cases also required to compensate for their damaging effect on natural production by financing hatcheries. This arrangement arose from what we in environmental economics call the polluter pay principle. In order to use the resources and extract benefits, the industry is required to pay for their damage in other sectors. However, as seen in e.g. Norway, this may not be enough to conserve salmon populations. This paper introduce a new way of thinking conservation. Instead of balancing costs and benefits of salmon conservation with the costs imposed on other commercial sectors, one should strengthen the polluter pay principle to conserve salmon. When an industry is allowed to use resources in a way that threaten the salmon species, one should impose a restriction that secure salmon populations. Hence, the restriction on e.g. hydropower production should be that the salmon is conserved, and then the implicit cost of the optimization problem, the shadow value, give us the direct cost of salmon conservation.