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- Title
A Seabird Population Model to Evaluate Plastic Pollution Policies.
- Authors
Ding, Tiffany; Kumar, Soryan; Shaw, Seiji
- Abstract
Due to convenience and low cost, plastic is used in many settings and then is quickly disposed of. Much of this plastic makes its way into oceans, where it contributes to declines in populations of ocean creatures. We consider predicted future seabird populations as a metric for evaluating the effect of plastic production. We model seabird population dynamics by considering births, natural deaths, and deaths due to interactions with plastic debris. Seabird population is expressed as a function of both time and mass of accumulated plastic. Our decision to use seabirds as a proxy for the health of the marine environment is backed up by scientific literature that establishes the usefulness of seabirds as a bioindicator. We predict that if global plastic production continues at its current pace, seabirds will become endangered by 2056 and critically endangered by 2062. Since the current plastic production trend is causing rapid degradation of our marine ecosystem, we need new policies for its production and management. We describe these policies as functions of accumulated plastic. We evaluate the environmental impact of a policy by simulating the seabird population with the plastic levels set by the policy. We determine the economic cost of a policy by considering the consequent reduction in plastic consumption, together with the rate of plastic reduction induced by the policy. We determine that an appropriate global policy is to reduce accumulated plastic by a constant amount each year until the remaining mass is less than 3,750 million metric tons. Such a policy would allow the seabird population to recover while imposing minimal economic cost to society. We develop an equitable approach for distributing the costs of achieving the optimal policy's goals across countries by taking into account each country's income, population, and accumulated plastic production. The burden of reducing plastic is placed more heavily on countries that currently produce plastic in excess of their required amounts.
- Subjects
SCIENTIFIC literature; PLASTIC scrap; POPULATION dynamics; MARINE ecology; POLLUTION; PLASTIC marine debris; MARINE debris; BIRTH rate
- Publication
UMAP Journal, 2020, Vol 41, Issue 3, p261
- ISSN
0197-3622
- Publication type
Article