Abstract
Optimal sustainable management of natural resources has been one of the major lines of research in environmental economics at least for the last two decades. Several attempts have been made in order to describe in a quantitative fashion the notion of sustainability and distinguish management policies between sustainable and non-sustainable ones. Important aspects of this task are (a) appropriate modeling of the spatio-temporal dynamics of the state of the system, including the sources of uncertainty affecting either directly or indirectly the problem at hand (e.g. climate conditions, population growth, biological evolution), and (b) the development of appropriate criteria for evaluating the welfare of the system under study that guarantees sustainability and viability. In this chapter, we present and discuss popular and established optimization approaches for investigating policy selection problems within the sustainability framework, from the perspective of viability and optimal control theory.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Professor A. Xepapadeas (Bologna and AUEB) for useful and insightful comments on this manuscript. This paper is a result of the project Water-Futures which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant agreement No. 951424).
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Koundouri, P., Papayiannis, G.I., Yannacopoulos, A.N. (2022). Optimal Control Approaches to Sustainability Under Uncertainty. In: Leal Filho, W., Dinis, M.A.P., Moggi, S., Price, E., Hope, A. (eds) SDGs in the European Region . Implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals – Regional Perspectives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91261-1_46-1
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