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The claim that nature delivers health benefits rests on a thin empirical evidence base. Even less evidence exists on how specific conservation policies affect multiple health outcomes. We address these gaps in knowledge by combining municipal-level panel data on diseases, public health services, climatic factors, demographics, conservation policies, and other drivers of land-use change in the Brazilian Amazon. To fully exploit this dataset, we estimate random-effects and quantile regression models of disease incidence. We find that malaria, acute respiratory infection (ARI), and diarrhea incidence are significantly and negatively correlated with the area under strict environmental protection. Results vary by disease for other types of protected areas (PAs), roads, and mining. The relationships between diseases and land-use change drivers also vary by quantile of the disease distribution. Conservation scenarios based on estimated regression results suggest that malaria, ARI, and diarrhea incidence would be reduced by expanding strict PAs, and malaria could be further reduced by restricting roads and mining. Although these relationships are complex, we conclude that interventions to preserve natural capital can deliver cobenefits by also increasing human (health) capital. Significance Nature threads the very fabric of human lives in remote forest areas of developing countries. Unfortunately, we do not fully understand how ecosystem services (such as human health benefits) could be secured by conserving natural capital. Thus, we analyze a rich dataset on disease, climate, demography, land uses, and conservation policies in the Brazilian Amazon. Unsurprisingly, we find that the health dividends vary across conservation policies and are small relative to the overall burden of these diseases. However, interventions targeted specifically at preserving biodiversity (strict protected areas) generate health cobenefits. Thus, given a chance, nature does its part for human (health) capital, especially for the poor and politically voiceless.

A large-scale treatment–control meta-analysis of US fisheries provides evidence that the implementation of catch shares extend fishing seasons by slowing the race to fish. No catch to sharing fish In fisheries, the competitive race to fish reduces fishing season length, threatens fish stocks and leads to ecological damage, economic waste and safety risks. Catch shares—whereby fishermen, fishing vessels or cooperatives are allocated a portion of the total allowable catch—are thought to slow the race to fish, but evidence to date has been limited to individual fisheries. In this meta-analysis, Martin Smith and colleagues show that the beneficial effect of catch shares on the race to fish holds true across 39 fisheries in the US. They suggest that these findings can inform the current debate over the expansion of market-based regulatory measures, such as catch shares, in fisheries. In fisheries, the tragedy of the commons manifests as a competitive race to fish that compresses fishing seasons, resulting in ecological damage, economic waste, and occupational hazards 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 . Catch shares are hypothesized to halt the race by securing each individual’s right to a portion of the total catch, but there is evidence for this from selected examples only 2 , 9 . Here we systematically analyse natural experiments to test whether catch shares reduce racing in 39 US fisheries. We compare each fishery treated with catch shares to an individually matched control before and after the policy change. We estimate an average policy treatment effect in a pooled model and in a meta-analysis that combines separate estimates for each treatment–control pair. Consistent with the theory that market-based management ends the race to fish, we find strong evidence that catch shares extend fishing seasons. This evidence informs the current debate over expanding the use of market-based regulation to other fisheries.

Fishery observers play a crucial role in the management and conservation of fish stocks, but the treatment they receive aboard fishing vessels can affect their ability to perform their duties. Using law enforcement data from the Northeast and Alaska regions, home to the most important commercial fisheries in the United States, we explore the extent of observer harassment, assault, interference, and obstruction (OHAIO). We find that 16% of 10,346 fishery violations reported in the Northeast and Alaska regions from 2014-2018 are observer-related, and over 80% of those involve OHAIO. We trace how OHAIO incidents are reported and processed and propose steps to mitigate the issue.

Fishers face multidimensional decisions: when to fish, what species to target, and how much gear to deploy. Most bioeconomic models assume single-species fisheries with perfectly elastic demand and focus on inter-seasonal dynamics. In real-world fisheries, vessels hold quotas for multiple species with heterogeneous biological and/or market conditions that vary intra-seasonally. We analyze within-season behavior in multispecies fisheries with individual fishing quotas, accounting for stock aggregations, capacity constraints, and downward-sloping demand. Numerical results demonstrate variation in harvest patterns. We specifically find: (1) harvests for species with downward-sloping demand tend to spread out; (2) spreading harvest of a high-value species can cause lower-value species to be harvested earlier in the season; and (3) harvest can be unresponsive or even respond negatively to biological aggregation when fishers balance incentives in multispecies settings. We test these using panel data from the Norwegian multispecies groundfish fishery and find evidence for all three. We extend the numerical model to account for transitions to management with individual fishing quotas in multispecies fisheries. We show that, under some circumstances, fishing seasons could contract or spread out.