Modeling the effects of natural disasters, wars, and migrations on sustainability or collapse of pre-industrial societies: Random perturbations of the Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY) model

TL;DR

This paper investigates how random external shocks like natural disasters and wars influence the sustainability or collapse of pre-industrial societies using the HANDY model, highlighting the robustness of endogenous dynamics and the impact of external perturbations.

Contribution

It introduces Gaussian noise into the HANDY model to analyze the effects of external shocks on societal collapse, demonstrating the model's robustness and the influence of perturbations.

Findings

Small perturbations (<10%) do not significantly alter outcomes.

External shocks can accelerate or delay societal collapse.

Endogenous dynamics primarily drive societal cycles.

Abstract

We study the effect of random perturbations in the Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY) model. HANDY models the interactions between human population, depletion, and consumption of natural resources. HANDY explains how endogenous human--nature interactions could lead to sustainability or collapse in past societies. We introduce a Gaussian random noise perturbation on the population change to represent generic external perturbations. The robustness of the results is investigated with statistical analysis based on probability distributions of specific events. Our study shows that the results of the unperturbed HANDY model are robust under small perturbations of $\lesssim$ 10\% of the Human population. Our results confirm that endogenous dynamics drive the societal cycles. However, exogenous perturbations, such as floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, infectious disease, epidemics, and wars, can accelerate or delay a collapse cycle.