The Habitat-Based Replacement Cost Method for Assessing Monetary Damages for Fish Resource Injuries

Abstract

Stocking of hatchery fish can quickly recover human use services such as fishing that are lost when human activities injure fishery resources. In such cases, hatchery costs are used to estimate replacement-based monetary damages for the injury. However, there is increasing concern that hatchery fish are not ecologically equivalent to wild fish, and therefore may fail to provide the same level of ecological and human use services provided by fish replaced through natural production. An alternative approach for estimating fish replacement costs, the habitat-based replacement cost (HRC) method, estimates the cost of restoring habitat to the level necessary to offset fish losses through natural production. By focusing on the production of wild fish in natural habitats, the HRC approach provides an ecologically-based alternative to hatchery-based replacement costs for both quantifying and monetizing fish resource injuries.