Effective Maintenance of the Ten-Year Fishing Ban in the Yangtze River, China: An Analysis Based on Evolutionary Game Theory

The Ten-year Fishing Ban (TFB) in the Yangtze River launched by China in 2019 has aroused global concern and multiple conflicts with related stakeholders. To explore effective strategies for ecological program management, we conducted a field survey and simulated different scenarios of policy implementation through the three-party game between the central government, local governments, and fishermen. The results show how various policy options influence the sustainability of the fishing ban. (1) Increasing the penalty for the local government so it is greater than their policy enforcement costs or improving the reward to greater than 0.8 times the ecological benefits, can effectively mobilize the local government's motivation and delay their shift to passive enforcement. (2) Current government assistance has not effectively met the actual needs of fishermen, so improving fund efficiency rather than fund scale can more effectively entice the fishermen to obey the fishing ban. (3) For illegal fishing, increasing the encounter frequency with fishermen has a greater deterrent effect than increasing the punishment severity, while the efficiency of livelihood support programs significantly influences the marginal benefit of punitive measures. When support efficiency improves to a moderate level, combining it with medium-to-high intensity penalties generates an optimal synergistic effect that can markedly accelerate system convergence. Therefore, a more sustainable fishing ban can be achieved by adding flexible penalties and economic rewards for the local government, improving the assistance for meeting the fishermen's livelihood demands, increasing the frequency of encounters with illegal fishing and diversifying the punishment measures.