Dynamic and stochastic analysis of environmental and natural resources

Uncertainty affects the dynamic trade-offs of environmental and natural resource management in a variety of ways and forms. The uncertain responses to anthropogenic activities may be due to genuine stochastic processes that drive the evolution of the underlying natural systems or simply due to our poor understanding of these complex systems and their interactions with the exploitation policies. These interactions are of particular importance when the ecosystem response might involve irreversibility, so that unexpected undesirable outcomes cannot be undone after they are realized. In this chapter, we review the various sources of uncertainty, the methodologies developed to account for them, and the implications regarding the management of environmental and natural resources.