Bio-economic resource management under threats of environmental catastrophes

We combine ecological and economic dynamics to study the management of a natural resource that supports both ecosystem and human needs. Shrinking the resource base introduces a threat of occurrence of catastrophic ecological events, such as sudden ecosystem collapse. The occurrence conditions involve uncertainty of various types, and the distinction among these types is important for optimal resource management. When uncertainty is due to our ignorance of some aspects of the underlying ecology, the isolated equilibrium states characterizing optimal exploitation for many renewable resource problems become equilibrium intervals. Genuinely stochastic events shift the optimal equilibrium states, but maintain the structure of isolated equilibria.