Economic impact of ocean acidification on shellfish production in Europe

Abstract

Ocean acidification (OA) is increasingly recognized as a major global problem. Despite the scientific evidence, economic assessments of its effects are few. This analysis is an attempt to perform a national and sub-national assessment of the economic impact of OA on mollusc production in Europe. We focus on mollusc production because the scientific evidence on the biological impact on calcifying organisms is ample relative to other types of marine organisms. In addition, Europe and its regions are significant producers of marine molluscs. By performing a partial-equilibrium analysis, we show that the highest levels of overall impact are found in the countries with the largest current production, such as France, Italy and Spain. For Europe as a whole, the annual impact will be over 1 billion USD in 2100. Due to the different production foci of the individual countries and their regions, the distribution of the impact is extremely uneven across countries and their respective regions, with the most affected sub-national regions being those on the Atlantic coast of France, which is an important region for oyster production.

Keywords:

• climate change
• economic assessment
• Europe
• ocean acidification
• shellfish

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Wolfgang Koeve for providing projected pH-changes in European waters for the RCP 8.5 scenario based on fully coupled Earth System Models for CMIP5/AR5 and Tim Hartmann for excellent GIS support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As a government initiative, the US government already estimates the social cost of carbon (i.e., the value of economic damage associated with a unit increase in carbon dioxide emissions) for its appraisal of government projects (Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon 2013).

2. For example, according to the FAO statistics, the European share of global aquaculture production of molluscs was 9% in 2010.

3. To be sure, capture and aquaculture fisheries involve various secondary activities such as seafood processing and may also create employment in such sectors. According to one estimate, the employment of one person in capture or aquaculture work creates an average of four jobs in secondary industry sectors (FAO, 2008: as cited by Hilmi et al. 2014). However, the macroeconomic impact of fishery-related employment would be small, even when including these secondary activities.

4. http://www.fao.org/fishery/statistics/en

5. The FAO data-set contains another category of molluscs: freshwater molluscs. We excluded this category from our analysis because it is not clear whether ocean acidification has any effect on freshwater organisms.

6. http://www.seaaroundus.org/

7. Cephalopods (octopuses, squids, etc.) are excluded from this category.

8. The supply elasticity is 0.2 for Eastern European and former Soviet Union countries and 0.4 for Western European countries. The demand elasticity is 1.01 for former Soviet Union countries, 0.97 for Eastern European countries and 0.91 for Western European countries.

9. The pH levels of European waters show some regional heterogeneity (see Figure 1.1 in the Appendix), but because of the limited information of the meta study on biological impact, the following analysis does not reflect the different levels of pH change across different areas.

10. The income elasticity is 0.55 for former Soviet Union countries, 0.45 for Eastern European countries and 0.35 for Western European countries.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research through the project “BIOACID (03F0655H)”.