A Preliminary Study on the Economic Impact Evaluation of the Protective Artificial Reef in the East China Sea on the Basis of Financial Indices
东海区资源保护型人工鱼礁经济效果评价

The artificial reef is referred to a kind of man-made facility that is placed in seabed in order to result in positive effects on physical, biological and socio-economic processes of marine biotic resources. It gainfully bears the characteristics of rehabilitation and restoration of the marine environment, and protecting and reserving fishery resources. A Large numbers of artificial reef projects have been developing in the East China Sea since the 21st century in order to restore and enhance fishery resources. It is especially important for future construction of artificial reefs to make reasonable evaluation on the economic impact of artificial reefs. In general, the evaluation index system associated with construction of artificial reefs comprises the added value of fishery production, the added value of the fishermen income, tax, and operation costs. However these indices are substantially difficult to establish quantitative evaluation criteria and evaluation methods. The financial indices have been applied to evaluate the economic impacts of non-commercial forests, non-commercial reservoir projects and highway in a series of current studies because of being able to provide explicit evaluation criteria and evaluation methods and to dynamically describe economic impacts. On the basis of socio-economic investigation data from 4 artificial reef projects in the East China Sea carried out for fishery resources conservation bear the characteristics as follows: 1) the construction scale is larger than void 5×104 m3; 2) the projects have been accomplished for over 2 years; 3) the type of the materials are ferroconcrete and discarded boat; and 4) the projects have track investigation records. Based on the attributes of artificial reefs, four dynamic financial evaluation indices were selected to perform the study, including net present value (NPV), dynamic payback period (DPP), inner rate of return (IRR) and benefit-cost ratio (BCR). Further, the fuzzy membership functions for the evaluation indices on artificial reefs were established. The weight for each evaluation index was assigned by using the entropy method in succession. Finally, synthetical evaluation values of economic impacts on artificial reefs were calculated. Results indicated the evaluation method proposed in this study was basically in good agreement with the socio-economic investigation to these artificial reefs, which would be applied to evaluate economic impacts of similar artificial reefs in the future.