Contributing to Coral Commons
Tropical coral reefs provide substantial ecosystem services on a global
and local scale: they produce fish, protect shore lines, provide tourism recreation, and host a huge biodiversity. But coral reefs face
unprecedented degradation that stems from various drivers operating at
multiple levels: for example, ocean acidification, temperature rise,
eutrophication or overfishing. From an economics perspective, coral
reefs are common pool resources, meaning that all would benefit from
halting degradation. However, the pursuit of individual benefits creates incentives to continue destruction.
This project contributes to resolving the crisis of tropical coral reefs
by employing different methods from economics, ethnography, and ecology
to investigate the factors that determine people’s willingness to
contribute to solving the coral commons dilemma. Results will help to
find institutional mechanisms to address the crisis. The project is
innovative in that it focuses on an ecological resource, but puts the
emphasis on the analysis of humans as the primary ecosystem engineer.
Also, it investigates the interaction between a global and a local
collective action problem by combining different methods.
Publications
Project start:
01. June 2014
Project end:
30. May 2017
Project management:
Prof. Colin Vance Ph.D.
Project staff:
Jörg Langbein
Project partners:
Leibniz-Zentrum für Marine Tropenökologie,
ZEW – Leibniz-Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung,
Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung,
Jacobs University Bremen,
Centre for Coastal and Marine Resources Studies, Bogor Agricultural University ,
Universitas Gadjah Mada, Dept. of Economics,
The Nature Conservancy
Funding:
Leibniz-Gemeinschaft