The Economics of Marine Plastic Pollution: What are the Benefits of International Cooperation?

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In its recently-announced 25 year environmental plan, the UK government highlights the pollution of the world's oceans by plastics as a key environmental problem in need of urgent action. As the plan notes, "The UK is committed to leading efforts to protect the marine environment. To tackle marine pollution, we will pursue a sustainable, international and transboundary approach [...]" (p.92). Scientific evidence on the environmental impacts of plastics in the world's oceans and coastlines has recently emerged, confirming the severity and global reach of this problem. Moreover, recent studies have made first attempts to quantify how much plastic is flowing into marine waters, where this comes from, and its transport and fate. Environmental impacts include those on marine life (such as sea birds, turtles, and marine mammals); marine plastics lead to a loss of human well-being through these effects, as well as through pollution of coastlines/beaches and through health effects from plastics accumulating in the food chain. However, emissions of plastics into the seas and oceans appear to be rising over time. Effective solutions to tackling this growing problem will require cooperation between nations, since marine plastics have many of the characteristics of a global "public bad" - emissions from any one country have impacts on citizens of other countries, and the national waters and coastlines of other countries. Since most actions to reduce emissions are costly, individual countries have an incentive to "free ride" on the pollution-reduction efforts of others, leading to problems of a lack of international cooperation on pollution reduction. As the UK government's 25 year plan states (p.92): "Tackling marine litter requires coordinated global and regional strategies."This inter-disciplinary project focusses on this international cooperation problem. Based on a case study of the North Atlantic nations, the main aim of the project is to develop and test a framework for identifying the benefits of international cooperation in reducing marine plastic pollution. The project has 5 objectives:1. To review and summarise scientific data on the ecological impacts of marine plastics on marine life;2. To quantify the way in which plastics are transported across the North Atlantic, so as to show the impacts of emissions from any one country on levels of plastic in international waters and on the coastal waters of other North Atlantic countries (along with current uncertainty over the size of these transfer effects);3. To develop estimates of the economic damage costs of marine plastics for 8 North Atlantic countries. This will be accomplished using a mix of original stated preference studies in the UK and US, along with benefits transfer methods;4. For each of these countries, to develop estimates of the (marginal) costs of reducing plastic "emissions" to the sea, including policy options related to changing consumer behaviour over purchase decisions and plastics packaging; and those related to changes in waste handling and processing systems;5. Using a game theoretical framework, to quantify the net benefits to each country of different levels of actions to reduce marine plastic pollution, and to quantify the net benefits of cooperation compared to non-cooperative actions.We anticipate that the project will produce results of direct interest to UK policymakers and other stakeholders in terms of the economic costs of marine plastic pollution, the costs of actions to reduce marine plastic, and the benefits of greater international cooperation. Moreover, the framework we will develop is designed to be transferable to other regional settings for marine plastic pollution (such as the South China Sea) and to other, comparable international pollution control problems. The inter-disciplinary team assembled to undertake this project includes economists and marine scientists with a track record of working together successfully.