Research
Much of the ocean's biological and mineral wealth sits outside any single country's control. When a resource is shared, contested, or governed by no one in particular, conservation stops being solely a technical problem and becomes a strategic one as well. Governments and firms decide where and what to fish, what policies to set, and how to structure collaboration and competition based on how much of the benefit they expect to capture. The Ocean Policy Lab applies techniques from the social sciences, often in concert with methods for biology and remote sensing, to understand these strategic responses and the governance institutions that might affect them. Below are a few themes of special focus.
Transboundary Fisheries
Most commercially valuable fish stocks move across national boundaries or into the high seas, so no one government captures the full benefit of conserving them. How much overfishing does that shared control actually cause? How will climate change alter it as stocks shift into new waters? And when governments intervene — through subsidies, port restrictions, trade rules, or access agreements sold to foreign fleets — what do these policies accomplish and cost?
Governing the Seabed
Commercial mining of the deep seabed may be close to beginning, in an understudied ecosystem and under a fragile international regime . What do we give up by mining a tract before we know what lives there, and how should that option value policy decisions? Do the International Seabed Authority's rules create the right incentives for mining and exploration? And how does seabed mining compare to terrestrial mining accounting for externalities, uncertainty, and different governance institutions?
Biodiversity Valuation
Many marine species face collapse or extinction, with uncertain consequences. How can we measure the value of biodiversity preservation? The genetic material in marine organisms has real commercial value, and new international agreements — the BBNJ treaty, the Nagoya Protocol, the Cali Fund — attempt to share the proceeds with the world. How should these revenues be raised and shared? More fundamentally, how do our governance institutions shape the relationship between humanity and the rest of the biosphere?
Blue Food Security
Roughly three billion people get a substantial share of their protein from fish, and hundreds of millions work in the sector, most of them at small scale. When distant-water fleets fish in developing countries' waters, or when a stock shifts away from the communities that depend on it, what happens to local food supply and income? How do wild capture and aquaculture substitute for each other, and what does that imply for fisheries policy? How do coastal households move between fishing and farming as climate change reshapes both?