Species substitutability, resilience, and the optimal management of ecological-economic systems

The significance of the concept of resilience in determining the static and the dynamic behavior of jointly determined ecological-economic systems has been recognized by ecologists at least since 1973 [1]. This notwithstanding, there are very few formal studies of such systems that analyze the ecological and the economic aspects of the problem. Consequently, this paper has two objectives. First, a new renewal theoretic measure of resilience is proposed. This measure explicitly accounts for the role of species substitutability in determining ecological resilience. Next, this measure is used to study some aspects of the optimal management of ecological-economic systems. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.