Collapse and the interplay between essentiality and impact in socioecological systems

Abstract

We study conditions leading to collapse on a nonequilibrium toy model introduced here for the interaction dynamics between a social and an ecological system based on the concept of essentiality of services and goods. One key difference from previous models is the separation between purely environmental collapse and that caused by an imbalance in the population consumption of essential goods. By studying different regimes defined by phenomenological parameters, we identify sustainable and unsustainable phases as well as the likelihood of collapse. The behavior of the stochastic version of the model is analyzed with a combination of analytical and computational techniques introduced here and shown to be consistent with key features of such processes in real life.