> Well I think we're slowly getting better at this. There's many cases (at least in the US and Europe) of fisherman organising themselves to avoid an entire ecosystem collapse.
We have done that for rivers (which had gone dry) in the US already, but selling property rights (or exploitation rights instead of property) for water zones could help prevent the overexploitation of sea resources. Once you own the zone or the exploitation rights, it's all in your interest to actively limit fishing in order to keep the value of your property over the long term. Trusting fishermen to limit themselves is a nice idea, but incredibly naive. In the mediterranean, there are strict limits for tuna exploitation and they are violated every single year by these fishermen, and not enforced properly.
> Trusting fishermen to limit themselves is a nice idea, but incredibly naive.
Well it's happened before. Fishermen associations getting together and being like "we will not have anything left to fish if we don't stop fishing so much" and they agreed. Basically ends up working.
But sometimes it backfires - in EU bans were introduced to stop fisherman from fishing out too much of a certain types of fish - but it's not like you can tell the fish to stay out of your nets, so what ended happening was that they would catch the banned species just like they used to but they couldn't bring it back inland,so it had to be thrown overboard before entering port - already dead. So it was the ultimate waste of resources - those fish have been killed for literally nothing, as they couldn't have even been consumed.
We have done that for rivers (which had gone dry) in the US already, but selling property rights (or exploitation rights instead of property) for water zones could help prevent the overexploitation of sea resources. Once you own the zone or the exploitation rights, it's all in your interest to actively limit fishing in order to keep the value of your property over the long term. Trusting fishermen to limit themselves is a nice idea, but incredibly naive. In the mediterranean, there are strict limits for tuna exploitation and they are violated every single year by these fishermen, and not enforced properly.