This work explores how qualitatively different impacts imposed on the environment by economic activity affect the relative importance of resilience measures focusing respectively on the return time and on the stability domain. Particularly, indicators of environmental impact of economic activities are shown to crucially depend on whether the ecosystem is subject to continuous or rather repeated discrete shocks. A stochastic approach allows the problem of accumulation arising from disturbances of a continuous nature to be embedded in the model, and therefore systematically dealt with. Such an approach in turn highlights the need for a new measure of resilience, encompassing features of both the currently most widely used definitions.
Economic Activities and the Resilience of Ecological Systems: A Stochastic Approach
DALMAZZONE, Silvana
1998-01-01
Abstract
This work explores how qualitatively different impacts imposed on the environment by economic activity affect the relative importance of resilience measures focusing respectively on the return time and on the stability domain. Particularly, indicators of environmental impact of economic activities are shown to crucially depend on whether the ecosystem is subject to continuous or rather repeated discrete shocks. A stochastic approach allows the problem of accumulation arising from disturbances of a continuous nature to be embedded in the model, and therefore systematically dealt with. Such an approach in turn highlights the need for a new measure of resilience, encompassing features of both the currently most widely used definitions.
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