Assessing the value of coral reefs in the face of climate change: the evidence from Nha Trang Bay, Vietnam

Coral reef ecosystems provide many important services to society. Their importance is not only proved by their beauty but also because they provide food and livelihood for millions of people in communities around the world, especially in developing countries. This paper estimates the economic value of coral ecosystems and potential impacts of climate change and fishing activities on the loss of coral reefs in Nha Trang Bay, Vietnam. Economic valuation and bio economic approaches are applied to combine socioeconocoral reef. The loss in economic value of coral under climate change and fishing effort scenarios is estimated which ranges from US$27.78 to US$31.72 million annually. This result is useful for policy makers to draw conclusions for climate policy, biodiversity conservation, sustainable development, and priorities for further work

Consumer’s perception and acceptance of lumpfish used in salmon cages

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Enforcement and Corruption in Management of Protected Areas

Protected areas (PAs) are important for biodiversity conservation and can provide the benefits for current and future generations. Management effectiveness is a key factor to achieve outcomes of PAs. However, success is related to the enforcement implemented. Corruption is one of the main issues impacting and weakening enforcement. This article provides the perspective for control the corruption to get the benefit from conservation from PAs. The individual agent’s behavior and social welfare will be investigated under scenarios with and without corruption

Protected Areas for Conflict Resolution and Management of Recreational and Commercial Fisheries

This paper investigates interactions between recreational and commercial fisheries. It introduces the idea of a protected area for recreational fisheries, as a way to reduce conflicts between the two sectors and to preserve the natural resource. It is demonstrated that without a protected area for recreational fisheries, open access may imply that only one sector survives. A protected area can assure the operation of both sectors, even under open access. This will also enhance the aggregate fish stock and the aggregate harvest, both in open access and in the optimal management of recreational fisheries, even if commercial fisheries operate under an open access regime

Willingness to adopt improved shrimp aquaculture practices in Vietnam

The shrimp industry plays a leading role in aquaculture development in Vietnam. Currently, the government is running a credit subsidy program to support farmers investing in improved production methods. This paper aimed to investigate white-legged shrimp farmers’ willingness to invest in improved production methods and to examine whether the current government policy for the sector is in line with farmers’ preferences using a discrete choice experiment. The results show that farmers do not care about the environmental impacts but emphasize increased yields and more successful crops as the main drivers of their willingness to invest. There is a mismatch between the current subsidized interest rate and farmers’ required interest rate. These findings suggest that to promote better investment in improved production methods, the government should focus on the regulatory framework, monitoring and control of environmental impacts, and reevaluate the size of the credit subsidy.acceptedVersio

Preferences for coastal and marine conservation in Vietnam: Accounting for differences in individual choice set formation

This paper has two objectives. The first is to estimate the value of implementing new coastal and marine conservation measures in Vietnam, focussing on the relative benefits of water quality improvements, coral conservation and control of marine plastic pollution. The second is to explicitly model any tendency of respondents to fail to give consideration to the “opt-out” or status quo option in a choice experiment, due to social and cultural factors. The analysis employs the independent availability logit model with random coefficients to simultaneously account for heterogeneity of preferences and choice set formation. Results show significantly improved model fit when consideration set heterogeneity is taken into account. However, estimates of preference weights and marginal willingness to pay for marine conservation measures are unaffected by this modelling choice

Isolation and genetic characterization of waterfowl parvovirus in ducks in Northern Vietnam

Background and Aim: Short beak and dwarfism syndrome (SBDS), a highly contagious disease, has been reported in duck farms in Vietnam since 2019. In this study, we evaluated the virulence and characterized the virus obtained from SBDS cases in North Vietnam. Materials and Methods: Polymerase chain reaction was used to detect waterfowl parvovirus in ducks, and the virus from positive samples was inoculated into 10-day-old duck-embryonated eggs to reproduce the disease in young ducklings to determine the virulence and subjected to phylogenetic analysis of non-structural (NS) and VP1 gene sequences. Results: Goose parvovirus (GPV) was isolated from ducks associated with SDBS in Vietnam. The virus Han-GPV2001 is highly virulent when inoculated into 10-day-old duck embryos and 3-day-old ducklings. The mortality rate of duck embryos was 94.35% within 6 days of virus inoculation. Inoculating 3-day-old ducks with the virus stock with 104.03 EID50 through intramuscular and neck intravenous administration resulted in 80% and 66.67% of clinical signs of SDBS, respectively, were shown. Phylogenetic analysis based on the partial NS and VP1 gene sequences revealed that the viral isolate obtained in this study belonged to novel GPV (NGPV) and was closely related to previous Vietnamese and Chinese strains. Conclusion: A GPV strain, Han-GPV2001, has been successfully isolated and has virulence in duck-embryonated eggs as well as caused clinical signs of SBDS in ducks. Phylogenetic analyses of partial genes encoding NS and capsid proteins indicated that the obtained GPV isolate belongs to the NGPV group

Essays on the economics of marine protected areas and fisheries management

Even though the oceans occupy more than 70% of the earth’s surface and 95% of the biosphere (National Research Council, 2001), marine habitats have undergone a substantial decline over the last few decades, and most of which is attributable to fishing. In this regard, marine reserves or marine protected areas (MPAs) are proposed as tools to relieve stresses on marine resources and ecosystems. Despite the advantages of MPAs compared to traditional management tools, some concerns have been expressed about the effectiveness of the creation of MPAs when there are links between MPAs and outside areas as a result of the dispersal process. If the open access regime is applied outside the MPAs, it can attract more fishermen to exploit benefits resulting from the migration process and this can reduce the effectiveness of the MPAs. The problem, thus, to be analysed in this dissertation is how MPAs can benefit for fisheries management, and the conditions under which they are beneficial. With the analyses in different contexts, this dissertation investigates following research questions how the efficiency of fishing vessels in an open access fisheries affected by the creation of a marine protected area, how managers can use compensation payment as a tool to get the support from fishermen for biodiversity conservation and is it possible to use protected areas for conflicts resolving and management of recreational and commercial fisheries. Dynamic bioeconomic model, stochastic frontier analysis and principal agent theory are applied in this dissertation as innovative approaches for studying MPAs. The implication from this dissertation is that MPAs are not a cure-all for fisheries management; however, MPAs may be valuable tools for biodiversity conservation and fisheries management if we apply them under appropriate conditions

Creation of Marine Reserve and Incentives for Biodiversity Conservation

Recently the ecosystem based management have been dealt with in management as a useful approach for fisheries. The goal of ecosystem-based management are sustainable management of fisheries and other marine resource through establishment of well-managed network of marine protected areas. Despite a number of benefits from marine reserve such as increased abundance and biodiversity and potential increased harvest in exploited areas, marine reserve does not provide incentives for fishermen to protected biodiversity and compensation for their financial loss due to the designation of marine reserve. To achieve the fishermen's support for marine reserves, some politicians have taken a new tack such as subsidizing or compensating the fishermen affected by new reserves. The compensation programs are not generally geared to induce the fishermen leave the sector. In fact it is the measure to help the industry adjust to new system of closure. The objective of this paper is to apply principal agent problem to define optimal reserve area, fishing effort and transfer payment in the context of symmetric and asymmetric information between manager and fishermen. It is argued that the principal agent is not applicable to fisheries because although the fish resource is common property and owned by public but the Government does not pay the fishermen to exploit the fish stock in the same way as an owner of a property pay a person to exploit it. However in the case of marine reserve when the managers provide transfer payment for the fishermen to compensate for their loss in catch and revenue in turn the fishermen has to conserve the marine reserve, application of principal agent problem is a reasonable method