Debate over Whale Shares in Ecological Applications

Leah Gerber and colleagues have proposed that a system of catch shares could be used to promote the conservation of whales by allowing conservation groups to buy quotas of whales from whalers – essentially this system is a cap-and-trade market for swapping permits to kill or conserve whales.  You can read about the initial proposal and our paper in response in the journal Ecological Applications – also see the news piece in Science about the exchange.