Treating the future fairly: Complications of uncertainty for sustainability

We address some of the challenges that uncertainty poses to economic analyses of sustainability. We focus on the act of choice and the epistemic and ethical context of that act, rather than on sharing rules. The nature of the uncertainty that decision makers face importantly affects the objective function and management outcomes.; Chapter 2 reviews different epistemic conditions that can afflict a decision maker concerned with honoring the future's rights. We find that under conditions of nescience, adopting a safe minimum standard of conservation is neither ad hoc nor economically inefficient. Thus, what is to be sustained is a function of the epistemic conditions.; The future must necessarily accept the consequences of our actions. Chapter 3 addresses the question of what constitutes responsible choice on behalf of the future, and borrows from trust law for guidance. Under conditions of risk and uncertainty one cannot know that an action will in fact provide the future its due. The responsible trustee must exercise more caution when acting on behalf of the trust beneficiary than when acting on behalf of himself.; Chapter 4 focuses on causes and persistence of ecological uncertainty. While much is made of ecologists' and economists' differences, in problems of inference they share a great deal. Different ways of making decisions when more than one model fits available data roughly comparably well are discussed. If near-term ecosystem responses to management treatments are uncertain, then our ability to predict long-term consequences of substituting constructed for natural capital will be even more so. Current-day ecological uncertainties raise questions about how concern for the future should be folded in with the difficulties that uncertainty pose.; Through computer simulations, the thesis explores economic, biological, and ecological consequences of different decision strategies. The backbone of the modeling effort consists of a twenty pool food web model of Lake Superior, a welfare model for Great Lakes fisheries, and commercial fishery cost estimates for harvests in Lake Superior. Different decision strategies are considered in both single-species and broader food web contexts, using dynamic programming.