An analysis of the world's environment and population dynamics with varying carrying capacity, concerns and skepticism

Peter Berck, Amnon Levy and Khorshed Chowdhury

Ecological Economics, 2012, vol. 73, issue C, 103-112

Abstract: Because of the open-access nature of the environment we consider an ad hoc adjustment of people's environmental footprint to the quality of the environment. The adjustment is motivated by environmental concern, but hindered by skepticism about announced changes in the state of the environment. Changes in the quality of the environment affect Earth's carrying capacity. By expanding the Lotka–Volterra predator–prey model to include these features we show that, despite skepticism, the environment does not deteriorate to a state in which humans cannot exist. We also show that in the ideal case of no skepticism, the interplay between the non-optimally changing environmental concerns and carrying capacity leads the world's environment and human population to a unique interior steady state along an oscillating course. These results require no further technological, social or international progress.

Keywords: Environment; Population; Carrying capacity; Concerns; Skepticism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800911003958
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:73:y:2012:i:c:p:103-112

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2011.09.019

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().