Evolutionary modelling in environmental economics

In this paper, we analyze some evolutionary models for the exploitation of renewable natural resources recently proposed in the specialized literature. The common feature shared by all these models is to consider the evolution of the resource, which is exploited by a population of heterogeneous interacting agents. We review several sources of agents’ heterogeneity: different attitudes towards exploitation (dynamics of cooperative vs. non-cooperative behaviours); harvesting in different patches where different rules are imposed (spatial heterogeneity); harvesting with different technologies (standard and ‘environmentally-friendly’ technologies); heterogeneity with respect to the targeted species.