The role of the Allee effect in common-pool resource and its sustainability

TL;DR

This paper explores how the Allee effect influences the sustainability of common-pool resources by modeling coevolutionary dynamics, revealing conditions for stability and the importance of knowledge feedback in resource management.

Contribution

It introduces two coevolutionary models incorporating the Allee effect, advancing understanding of resource dynamics and human behavior in sustainability contexts.

Findings

Allee effect can cause bi-stability and critical transitions in resource systems.

Knowledge feedback improves resilience and sustainability.

Initial conditions and parameters determine sustainable or unsustainable outcomes.

Abstract

The management of common-pool resources is a complex challenge due to the risk of overexploitation and the tragedy of the commons. A novel framework has been introduced to address this issue, focusing on the coevolutionary relationship between human behavior and common-pool resources within a human-environment system. However, the impact of the Allee effect on the coevolution and its resource sustainability is still unexplored. The Allee effect, a biological phenomenon characterized by a correlation between resource availability and growth rate, is a fundamental attribute of numerous natural resources. In this paper, we introduce two coevolutionary models of resource and strategy under replicator dynamics and knowledge feedback by applying the Allee effect to the common-pool resources within human-environment system. These models encapsulate various facets of resource dynamics and the players' behavior, such as resource growth function, the extraction rates, and the strategy update rules. We find that the Allee effect can induce bi-stability and critical transition, leading to either sustainable or unsustainable outcomes depending on the initial condition and parameter configuration. We demonstrate that knowledge feedback enhances the resilience and sustainability of the coevolving system, and these results advances the understanding of human-environment system and management of common-pool resources.