Gaby E. CarpenterFollow

Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Honors Thesis (Open Access)

Department

Colby College. Economics Dept.

Advisor(s)

Michael Donihue

Second Advisor

Randy Nelson

Abstract

The Gulf of Maine (GOM) American lobster (Homarus americanus) stock accounts for 90% of the U.S. American lobster landings. This makes it an extremely valuable and important fishery on a national scale, but also to the state of Maine. In the past decade, the fishery has experienced rapid fluctuation in landings and price due to anthropogenic influences of the water temperature in the GOM. Given the economic importance of the fishery, it is important to understand the future impacts of climate change on the availability of lobster and economic consequences of these shifts. A bio-economic model is used in the analysis of the supply and demand to determine the effect of warmer ocean waters on the American lobster. The current supply and demand for the American lobster is estimated using an ordinary least squares regression. The estimated supply model is simulated under a higher temperature scenario and fed into the demand model to simulate a new lobster price. Overall, it was projected that the higher temperature scenario results in a 9% increase in lobster landings and 8% decrease in the price per pound of lobsters. While this is a preliminary study of an integrated supply and demand model that incorporates the impacts of climate change, the results are robust. This motivates future studies to understand the implications of higher ocean temperature on lobsters and the large economy in the state of Maine that rely on the resource.

Keywords

American Lobster, Climate Change, Gulf of Maine

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