Management of Open-Access Renewable Resources with Depensation Dynamics: Control Systems Perspective

Renewable resources are being over exploited at an increasing rate. Institutions/governments are compelled to devise effective policies and strategies to sustainably manage renewable resources under social, ecological and environmental pressures that stem from increasing demand, model uncertainties, disturbances, and measurement errors. Open-access policies to harvest renewable resources are still widely used around the world. They are mildly regulated by implementing landing quotas, defining harvesting seasons, and/or constraining the technology used for harvesting. In many parts of the world, including the regions that are highly developed, open-access fisheries are failing. In this paper, management of an open-access renewable resource (fishery) with depensation dynamics is formulated as a control systems problem and a strategy to sustainably manage the renewable resource is proposed. First, dynamics of an unregulated open-access fishery is described and its ulnerabilities are stated. Then, an easy-to-implement regulation strategy based on classical control systems ideas is proposed and its robustness characteristics are provided. The management policy (control law) is implemented via manipulating economic variables, i.e. by adjusting the (opportunity) cost of harvesting. An agent-based model is used to model the resource exploiters (i.e. fishermen). It is shown that a classical control law can be used to effectively manage an open access fishery subject to sampling effects.