Quantifying the transient response of ecological-economic systems to perturbations

Ecologists and economists are increasingly in agreement that ecological and economic systems are linked and that these actually should be viewed as one system. Perhaps because this recognition has been very recent, neither ecologists nor economists have studied the short-term behavior of jointly determined ecological-economic systems that are subject to perturbations stemming from natural events and the continuance of economic activities. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to construct a metric that can be used to quantify the transient response of ecological-economic systems to perturbations. This metric is a non-asymptotic measure of an ecological-economic systemʹs resilience.