Economic markets are a potent force when it comes to conservation. The quest for profits is a primary driver of today’s extinction crisis, from the black-market trade in rhino horns to the devastation of global rainforests in the pursuit of gold, lumber, and farmland.
Conservationists have begun trying to harness these same powers in the name of protecting biodiversity, by creating financial incentives for people to protect the natural world rather than pillage it.
But, as any stock trader will tell you, beware the complexity and unpredictability of the market. Sometimes, you might wind up with the opposite outcome from the one you wanted.
A case in point is a program in Indonesia aimed at protecting threatened sharks and rays by paying fishers to release them unharmed. A study designed to examine how well the initiative worked has found that, perversely, it was driving small-scale fishers to catch more of the animals and leading to more destruction.
The results, described in a paper published today in Science Advances, don’t mean that such pay-to-release programs are doomed to fail, said Paul Ferraro, an economist and expert in human behavior and public policy at Johns Hopkins University and a study co-author. But it does highlight the need for testing such initiatives before rolling them out.
“Pay-to-release schemes for endangered species caught by local fishers are being implemented around the world,” he said. “Yet these schemes tend to be implemented without anyone asking whether they actually make a difference to the catch of endangered species.”
The strategy seems simple. If something is being destroyed by people who are trying to make a living, just match those economic benefits by paying them to NOT destroy that thing. Taking a page from that book, an Indonesian marine conservation group, Kebersamaan Untuk Lautan, teamed up with researchers to entice fishers in five villages to kill fewer critically endangered hammerhead sharks and wedgefish (a kind of ray).
While international treaties ban trade in these species, there is no similar law for people catching the fish in Indonesia. The fish, sometimes caught on purpose and sometimes accidential “bycatch,” are an important source of food and income for small-scale fishers, who make up more than 90% of the Indonesian fishing fleet.
To enlist fishers to save these endangered fish, the conservation group and scientists created a kind of reverse bounty – paying fishers the market value of the fish if they instead released their prey back into the water. To make sure people weren’t just faking the releases, they gave fishers video cameras and confirmed the authenticity of the images. The fishers needed to show an animal being put back in the water and swimming away before a payment would be made.
At first glance, the project was a success. The fishers paid to release fish showed a 71% reduction in wedgefish deaths and a 4% decline in hammerhead mortality, based on the number of releases they caught on video. A conservation success, right?
Not so. To see if some other less obvious market forces might be at play, the scientists also monitored the number of hammerheads and wedgefish being caught by neighboring boats that weren’t getting an incentive to release fish.
The scientists discovered that the boats not getting the incentives were catching fewer of the endangered fish overall. Interviews with the fishers revealed that the ones getting the release bounties were trying harder to catch fish so that they could cash in on the payments.
This might do little more than drive up the cost of the payments, except for a major problem: Many fish that are caught and released don’t survive for long. After adjusting for expected survival rates, the scientists concluded the program had led to only a 25% reduction in wedgefish deaths and, astonishingly, increased the death toll for hammerheads by 44%.
“These results do not imply that pay-to-release programs cannot work but rather demonstrate the complexity of designing incentive-based conservation programs and the importance of piloting them using experimental designs before scaling up,” Ferraro wrote in an email.
The pattern of fisher behavior led scientists to suspect that payments might have been too low in one place, leading to fewer releases, and too high in another, causing too much fishing. Success was also hindered by the kind of fishing gear being used. In one area where nets are widely used, the wedgefish could survive while entangled, but hammerheards, which must keep moving to force oxygenated water over their gills, often suffocated. In other part of the country where baited longlines were used, the larger fish were often dead by the time a fisher found them.
The research is already prompting the scientists and NGO to tweak the program. That includes different payments for different sizes of fish to better match a fish’s value; capping the number of release payments a fisher can get in a week; and enabling fishers to trade in their fishing equipment for gear that is less lethal to the endangered animals.
Maybe that will enable them to get the market to behave the way they want it to and make good on the promise of this conservation strategy.
“Incentive-based programs play a critical role in effective and socially just nature conservation,” said Hollie Booth, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford who led the field work. “We can’t expect small-scale resource users to bear the majority of the costs of conservation, especially when there are wealthier and more powerful stakeholders causing major negative impacts.”
Booth, et. al. “Conservation impacts and hidden actions in a randomized trial of a marine pay-to-release program.” Science Advances. April 23, 2025.
Image: A fisher in KUL’s program carefully releases a Critically Endangered wedgefish. ©Francesca Page
