Quota Market to Save Whales Proposed by U.S. Researchers

A team of U.S. researchers has suggested that a system of tradable quotas for whales could significantly reduce the number of the animals killed each year. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Arizona State University propose that putting a price on whales will allow conservation groups to “purchase” some whales and prevent whalers from killing them. While they acknowledge that critics will argue that a species should be protected “irrespective of its economic value,” the authors say previous efforts to reduce whaling have failed because of this lack of accounting for economic value. Despite a global moratorium on whaling, the number of whales killed annually has more than doubled since the 1990s, with nearly 2,000 now harvested per year. The authors propose splitting the majority of quotas between whaling and non-whaling nations, with the rest auctioned off to benefit whale conservation. According to their calculations, the per-whale price would be about $13,000 for a minke and $85,000 for an endangered fin whale.