Quantifying the Transient Response of Ecological-Economic Systems to Perturbations

Ecologists and economists are increasingly in agreement that ecological and economic systems are linked and that these systems ought to be viewed as one system. Perhaps because this recognition has been rather recent, neither ecologists nor economists have analyzed the transient behavior of jointly determined ecological-economic systems that are subject to perturbations arising from natural events and the continuance of economic activities. Consequently, the objective of this paper is to construct a metric that can be used to quantify the short term response of ecological-economic systems to perturbations. This metric is a non-asymptotic measure of an ecological-economic system's resilience