Marine conservation can be costly. Sometimes, the costs are so high that even committed actors may miss the opportunity to engage in it. While technological can help reduce costs, there is an opportunity to leverage policies to re-shape human incentives: make conservation not only affordable, but perhaps even profitable.
These line of research explores different ways in which modest changes to our current approach to marine conservation can result in large gains. This include reforms to existing environmental markets, self-financed marine protected areas, or monetizing the biomass-accrual benefits of protection. More recent work looks at a global market for marine conservation, or at the benefits that small-scale fishers derive from limited extraction of high-valued resources from their community-based marine protected areas.