Renewable Resource Management in Developing Countries: How Long Until Crisis?

A key goal of renewable resource managers in developing countries is to take actions to ensure that the resource being managed stays away from irreversible or crisis states, in which it provides neither consumptive nor non‐consumptive services to humans. However, despite a manager's best efforts, the resource may still hit a crisis state. Therefore, given a particular management regime, it is useful to know how long it takes until the resource hits a crisis state. In this paper, the authors provide a theoretical analysis of this hitherto unstudied question. They first probabilistically delineate two management regimes. Next, they compute the expected time until crisis for both these regimes. Finally, they provide a numerical example to illustrate the working of their model and then discuss the implications of their findings for renewable resource management in developing countries.