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 chapter, we provide a theoretical analysis of this hitherto unstudied question. We first probabilistically delineate two management regimes. Next, we compute the expected time until crisis for both these regimes. Finally, we provide a numerical example to illustrate the working of our model and then we discuss the implications of our findings for renewable resource management in developing countries.