BOEM Grant: Inferring Socioeconomic Impacts of Offshore Energy on Commercial Fisheries from MPA Outcomes

This Program Announcement is specifically to declare the intent to undertake the following project: Using Outcomes from Marine Protected Area Implementation to Infer Potential Socioeconomic Consequences of Offshore Energy Development to Commercial Fisheries.
This Announcement describes a cooperative agreement that may be awarded to the University of California, Santa Barbara, under the umbrella of the California Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CESU), of which both BOEM and UCSB are members. A CESU project is a collaborative effort of agency and partner scientists initiated upon agency or partner identification of a need to address an area of concern that falls under the California CESU mission. This is not an open solicitation for proposals. This award is contingent upon the receipt of an acceptable proposal.

The objective of this study is to describe the detectable socioeconomic consequences experienced by the commercial fishing industry from implementing marine protected areas. Researchers will first identify socioeconomic indicators most likely to be useful to measure potential effects of prospective offshore wind energy developments in the Pacific, and include commercial, recreational, and tribal sectors. Sources of data to determine relevant indicators will be existing literature, case studies of current Offshore Wind Facilities and their outcomes, and analogs of offshore closures (e.g., military activities, MPAs, offshore conventional energy, offshore aquaculture, etc.) that have generated space-use conflicts. When disentangling the causal effect of MPAs from other drivers in fishery socioeconomic outcomes, researchers will focus on relevant metrics (e.g., total landing revenues, catch per unit effort, number of trips, kilometers traveled, etc.) derived in the previous task, and establish proper treatment and control datasets.