We compare groundwater use under collective well management in China, where village leaders allocate water among households, and under private well management where farmers either pump from their own wells or buy water from wells owned by other farmers. Villages are divided into connected or...

Ecosystem services analysis can help recognize the full costs and benefits of land management decisions. Quantification and valuation of services can enhance policies and regulations and, if linked with payments or incentives, properly reward private decisions that yield public benefits....

In this paper we analyze the efficiency of voluntary incentive-based land-use policies for biodiversity conservation. Two factors combine to make it difficult to achieve an efficient result. First, the spatial pattern of habitat across multiple landowners is important for determining...

We analyze how the threat of a potential future regime shift affects optimal management. We use a simple general growth model to analyze four cases that involve combinations of stock collapse versus changes in system dynamics, and exogenous versus endogenous probabilities of regime shift. Prior...

Complex dynamic systems can undergo changes in feedbacks between system components causing a rapid and persistent shift in system behavior (“regime shifts”), and potentially reduce welfare from declining provision of important ecosystem services. In this paper, we provide an analytical...

Society faces difficult choices over whether to allow habitat conversion for economic gain versus conserving habitat to protect biodiversity. Because the conservation of biodiversity and the material well being of the human population are both important goals, it is important to set conservation...

Resilience to specified kinds of disasters is an active area of research and practice. However, rare or unprecedented disturbances that are unusually intense or extensive require a more broad-spectrum type of resilience. General resilience is the capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt or...