Chapter 39 Poverty, institutions, and the environmental resource-base

The chapter discusses the environment and emerging development issues and provides an account of a central aspect of the lives of the rural poor in poor countries based on a wide-ranging analytical and empirical literature that has developed quite independently of the subject of development economics and the Brundtland Report. These services are generated by interactions among organisms, populations of organisms, communities of populations, and the physical and chemical environment in which they reside. Ecosystems are involved in a number of functions and offer a wide range of services. Many are indispensable, as they provide the underpinning for all human activities. Population and ecosystem ecology differ by way of the state variables characterized as complex systems. The carrying capacity of an ecosystem is the maximum stress capable of absorbing without flipping to a vastly different state. Ecosystems are endemically subject to natural shocks and surprises. Resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to recover from perturbations, shocks, and surprises.