Harvesting and conserving a species when numbers are low: population viability and gambler's ruin in bioeconomic models

Abstract In bioeconomic models of renewable resources, population viability is either ignored entirely or the minimum viable population (MVP) is considered a crisp threshold below which a species is driven to extinction. Neither is consistent with ecological science. The purpose in this paper is, firstly, to enhance ecological realism in economic models by incorporating insights regarding population viability from conservation biology. We consider the effects of chance on optimal management and briefly discuss key results regarding population viability as derived by biologists. Second, as a means to ‘balance interests and morality’, we suggest a fuzzy compromise between the economist's and the biologist's preferred stock sizes.

[1]  G. C. van Kooten.  The economics of nature , 2000 .

[2]  Eduardo S. Schwartz,et al.  Investment Under Uncertainty. , 1994 .

[3]  R. Lande,et al.  Optimal harvesting, economic discounting and extinction risk in fluctuating populations , 1994, Nature.

[4]  H. Zimmermann,et al.  Fuzzy Set Theory and Its Applications , 1993 .

[5]  J. Dubucs,et al.  Philosophy of probability , 1993 .

[6]  John R. Boyce.  Optimal Capital Accumulation in a Fishery: A Nonlinear Irreversible Investment Model , 1995 .

[7]  David Quammen,et al.  The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions , 1998 .

[8]  R. Primack,et al.  Essentials of Conservation Biology , 1994 .

[9]  E. Bulte,et al.  Metapopulation dynamics and stochastic bioeconomic modeling , 1999 .

[10]  Michael C. Farmer,et al.  The Rationality of a Safe Minimum Standard , 1998 .

[11]  E. Bulte,et al.  Economic Science, Endangered Species, and Biodiversity Loss , 2000 .

[12]  Prasanta K. Pattanaik,et al.  Fuzzy Sets, Preference and Choice: Some Conceptual Issues , 1989 .

[13]  M. Sagoff,et al.  The Economy of the Earth: The Allocation and Distribution of Resources , 2007 .

[14]  R. Berrens,et al.  Implementing the safe minimum standard approach: two case studies from the U.S. Endangered Species Act , 1998 .

[15]  S. Farrow.  Extinction and market forces: two case studies , 1995 .

[16]  J. Shogren.  A Political Economy in an Ecological Web , 1998 .

[17]  R. Lande,et al.  Viable Populations for Conservation: Effective population size, genetic variation, and their use in population management , 1987 .

[18]  J. Shortle,et al.  The optimal control of emissions and renewable resource harvesting under uncertainty , 1996 .

[19]  S. Gottwald,et al.  Fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic, fuzzy methods with applications , 1995 .

[20]  Erwin H. Bulte,et al.  Uncertainty and forest land use allocation in British Columbia: vague priorities and imprecise coefficients. , 1997 .

[21]  C. Schulz.  Trade policy and ecology , 1996, Environmental and Resource Economics.

[22]  Robert S. Pindyck,et al.  Uncertainty in the Theory of Renewable Resource Markets , 1984 .

[23]  R. Leakey,et al.  THE SIXTH EXTINCTION , 1996 .

[24]  T. Swanson.  The Economics of Extinction Revisited and Revised: A Generalised Framework for the Analysis of the Problems of Endangered Species and Biodiversity Losses , 1994 .

[25]  W. Norton,et al.  Extinction: bad genes or bad luck? , 1991, New scientist.

[26]  Erwin H. Bulte,et al.  The Economics of Nature: Managing Biological Assets , 2000 .

[27]  F. Clarke,et al.  The Optimal Exploitation of Renewable Resource Stocks: Problems of Irreversible Investment , 1979 .

[28]  Bart Kosko,et al.  Neural networks and fuzzy systems , 1998 .

[29]  Emina Krcmar,et al.  Preference Uncertainty in Non‐Market Valuation: A Fuzzy Approach , 2001 .

[30]  M. Soulé,et al.  Viable Populations for Conservation , 1987 .

[31]  E. Bulte,et al.  Marginal Valuation of Charismatic Species: Implications for Conservation , 1999 .

[32]  C. Clark.  The Economics of Overexploitation , 1973, Science.

[33]  Guillermo A. Mendoza,et al.  Forest planning and decision making under fuzzy environments: an overview and illustration , 1989 .

[34]  H.-J. Zimmermann,et al.  Fuzzy set theory—and its applications (3rd ed.) , 1996 .

[35]  M. Common.  Sustainability and policy , 1995 .

[36]  Didier Dubois,et al.  A Glance at Non-Standard Models and Logics of Uncertainty and Vagueness , 1993 .

[37]  William J. Reed,et al.  Optimal escapement levels in stochastic and deterministic harvesting models , 1979 .

[38]  The economics of extinction , 1994, Nature.

[39]  Michael A. Toman,et al.  Economics and "Sustainability": Balancing Trade-offs and Imperatives , 1994 .

[40]  M. Cropper.  A note on the extinction of renewable resources , 1988 .

[41]  Jon M. Conrad,et al.  Natural Resource Economics , 2020 .