Aspects of the Management of Ecological-Economic Systems with a Safe Minimum Standard

Abstract

Unless there is managerial intervention, the ability of an ecological-economic system to provide humans with key services will decline probabilistically. We model such an ecological-economic system with a Brownian motion process with negative drift. The manager’s goal is to prevent this system’s ability to provide key services from declining to a level below the so called safe minimum standard (SMS). We model this goal rigorously and then, on the assumption that the goal is met, we characterize the steady state probability distribution function of the ecological-economic system under study.