This book examines quantitative and formal links between sustainable development issues, decision and precaution problems in the management of natural resource. It covers such areas fisheries, agriculture, biodiversity, exhaustible resource and pollution.

Nowadays, environmental issues including air and water pollution, climate change, overexploitation of marine ecosystems, exhaustion of fossil resources, conservation of biodiversity are receiving major attention from the public, stakeholders and scholars from the local to the planetary scales. It is now clearly recognized that human activities yield major ecological and envir- mental stresses with irreversible loss of species, destruction of habitat or c- matecatastrophesasthemostdramaticexamplesoftheire?ects.Infact,these anthropogenic activities impact not only the states and dynamics of natural resources and ecosystems but also alter human health, well-being, welfare and economic wealth since these resources are support features for human life. The numerous outputs furnished by nature include direct goods such as food, drugs, energy along with indirect services such as the carbon cycle, the water cycle and pollination, to cite but a few. Hence, the various ecological changes our world is undergoing draw into question our ability to sustain economic production, wealth and the evolution of technology by taking natural systems into account. The concept of sustainable development covers such concerns, although no universal consensus exists about this notion. Sustainable development - phasizes the need to organize and control the dynamics and the complex - teractions between man, production activities, and natural resources in order to promote their coexistence and their common evolution. It points out the importance of studying the interfaces between society and nature, and es- ciallythecouplingbetweeneconomicsandecology.Itinducesinterdisciplinary scienti?c research for the assessment, the conservation and the management of natural resources.

Mixes well-known material and applications with new insights especially from viability and robust analysis

Autorentext

Professor Pierre Carpentier's primary research areas are Decomposition and Coordination for the Optimization of Large-Scale Systems in the stochastic framework, with a special interest in numerical methods. He is currently working at the applied mathematics unit UMA, ENSTA ParisTech, France. Professor J. Ph. Chancelier's research contributions have been in the fields of Stochastic Optimization, Control and Computer Languages for Numerical Computations. He currently holds a position at the applied mathematics center research CERMICS, École des Ponts ParisTech, France. The main research contributions of Professor Guy Cohen have been in the theory of Decomposition and Coordination for the Optimization of Large-Scale Systems, in the development of a "linear" theory of a certain class of Discrete Event Systems based on the use of the so-called Max-Plus algebra, and more recently in numerical methods for Stochastic Optimal Control. He is currently a Researcher Emeritus. Professor Michel De Lara's main theoretical research fields are control theory and stochastic control. With regard to applications, he specializes in developing mathematical methods for the sustainable management of natural resources, concentrating on renewable energy and biodiversity. He currently holds a position at the applied mathematics center research CERMICS, École des Ponts ParisTech, France.

Inhalt
Sequential decision models.- Equilibrium and stability.- Viable sequential decisions.- Optimal sequential decisions.- Sequential decisions under uncertainty.- Robust and stochastic viability.- Robust and stochastic optimization.- Sequential decision under imperfect information.