Syndicate
Extinctions Caused Due To Rights of Deficient Properties
A great number of problems are caused when nobody has the property rights of a given resource. Particularly, most of the extinction of species is the result of lack of property rights.
For example, think about all the types of fish living in the ocean. According to a national treaty nobody is the owner of the open ocean, therefore nobody owns the fish that live in it.
However, if you do catch some fish and pull it up onto your boat, you automatically acquire the property right over that fish and you are allowed to sell it for money. In other words, the only way to benefit from the fish you have just caught is by killing it and selling it.
The result of this is that there are many other species of fish that are fished in excess and many of which are close to becoming extinct. This is mainly due to the fact that each fisherman has the incentive to catch as many fish as he can in the least amount time as possible, before somebody else is able to get to them. This obviously causes quick extinction of certain species & fishermen are very aware of the problem.
However, given to the way the property rights are established in this type of case, there is nothing any individual fisherman can do to stop this problem. The reason is that if one of them decides to stop with hopes that the species will survive, someone else will simply arrive and will grab those fish as quickly as they can. In other words, the species will become extinct anyways and as a result of this; nobody has the incentive to stop.
The only way these problems can be eliminated is by changing the property rights in such a way that people are able to be the owner of a live fish as well as a dead one. If you own a fishpond, well your main objective is obviously going to be to keep the fish alive as this will end up benefiting you.
In the case of intensive fishing, one solution has been to give fishermen the property rights over a certain fishing area. In other words, they are allowed a certain area while the fish are still alive. This gives the new owners the right incentives to manage the existences in a sustainable way. Even more so, given that only one person has the right to fish in an allotted spot, there will no longer be the race to get there before the other guy gets there.
For the species of fish that migrate freely between different areas there are different solutions that have been developed. In these types of cases the biologists first determine the maximum amount of fish that can be caught in one year in a sustainable way. The government then auctions off the rights of permission to fish that exact amount of fish.
This method creates a new type of property rights, which are the fishing rights. It also has the benefit of creating a government program that is self-sufficient. The money that is obtained by auctioning off the fishing rights can be used to hire guards that will avoid fishermen that do not have licenses from fishing and this will all lead to preserving our fauna.