Sustainable management of renewable resources: a comparison of alternative decision approaches

Abstract

SUMMARY There has been an active political and academic debate about the meaning of sustainable development, which has led to a growing number of definitions and policy paradigms. This paper explores the traditional, economic definition of sustainable development along with a multiobjective framework for temporal decision-making. The fields of operations research and ecology are used to provide a perspective on issues of intergenerational equity and ecological integrity as well as economic efficiency. A simple, dynamic renewable resource allocation model is used to look at how resource management objectives and decisions change under varying definitions and problem scope. Impacts from temporal manipulation of how decisions are made, using a multiobjective approach, have suggested adjustments to decision-time steps according to initial conditions and time-horizon. Potential use of this form of policy alternative includes the regulation of many open access resources, including water resources.