DR. SHIRI ZEMAHSHAMIR

Greening The Marine Environment

For the first time in Israel, a new study in the School of Sustainability is evaluating the marine natural capitalfish provisioning using the System of EnvironmentalEconomic Accounting (SEEA) methodology of the Levantine Basin in the Mediterranean Sea. This is the first attempt to implement natural capital accounting to assess the economic trade-off between native and invasive species in Israel. In this study, led by Dr. Shiri Zemah-Shamir, senior lecturer and Head of the Economics-Sustainability track, authors will present new insights on green accounting and fishing quantification to be published in the journal Ecological Economics

One of the most common environmental criticisms on GDP (Gross Domestic Product) calculation, is that it ignores some of the natural capital. Moreover, it fails to account for environmental degradation and resource depletion, and does not promote economic regulations.

Monetization of natural capital needs to be approached carefully, so the authors have applied a novel multi-disciplinary approach by combining results from scenarios of the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) suite of models with SEEA, to construct physical and monetary accounts for marine fisheries in the Israeli Mediterranean. The authors analyzed changes in fish stock biomass and stock value over two time periods and two scenarios: BAU and the new Israeli fishing regulations.

The study is the first to construct fishery accounts by fishing method, including recreational fishery, to analyze the economic contribution of each fishing method, and commercial fishery and future values by considering historical (1994–2010) and projected (2011–2060) time series. In this study the authors also present the increasing role that invasive species are playing in marine ecosystems globally.