and holistic perspectives on corporate sustainability*

Evolutionary and environmental economics have a potentially close relationship. This paper reviews past and identifies potential applications of evolutionary concepts and methods to environmental economics. This covers a number of themes: resource use and ecosystem management; growth and environmental resources; economic and evolutionary progress; and individual behavior and environmental policy. The treatment will cover both biological and economic – including institutional, organizational and technological – evolutionary phenomena. Attention will be drawn to the fact that evolutionary economics shows a surprising neglect of environmental and natural resource factors.

. Some aspects of evolution are, by their very nature, unsuited to a process of direct experimentation. The work described here is a computational system strongly inspired by real ecology, it is intended as a framework within which the interaction of evolution, learning and cultural effects may be investigated. The design, development and behaviour of the system is outlined in some detail. 1 Introduction "Augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuutus. Inque brevis spatio mutantus saecla animantum. Et quasi cursores vitae lampada tradunt" Lucretius -- De Rerum Naturae ii.7 The computational ecology described here was conceived as a system for the investigation of a number of aspects of natural adaptation and their inter-relationships and is an extensive development of earlier work [DKP96]. The implementation is a multi-agent system, the agents being inspired by the animat approach [Wil90] and their environment being derived from a number of salient ecological principles. Special attention h...

We present a system developed for the application of evolutionary computation techniques to ecological simulation. A model ecosystem comprised of discrete adaptive agents and a biologically inspired environment is described and results presented. The agents are classifier based animats and the overall system has been derived from real ecologies and interactions.

This paper outlines the design and implementation of an artificial ecology for the investigation of hypotheses relating to real ecologies. An individual based model is used where the differences between individuals provide the basis for selection. 1 Introduction An overview of the design and implementation of a plant-herbivore simulation system, Herby, is presented. Many of the motivational and design details have been omitted due to considerations of space, more information may be found in [DKP96] and [Dev96]. Herby is an individual based model and was designed to investigate aspects of ecologies that do not lend themselves to formal analytic mathematical techniques, a feature of many complex systems [CWFL]. An individual based model was developed for a number of reasons, the two most important being as follows: Firstly the simulation of natural selection logically necessitates the representation of individual variation, an individual based model allowing this to be done explicitly. ...

Introduction: context and scope of the study In the spirit of the growing environmental awareness in the past decades, we witness nowadays an increasing interest in biodiversity, both locally and world-wide. Biodiversity requires our attention for two reasons. First, it provides a wide range of benefits to mankind and human activities. Second, many human activities have contributed to unprecedented rates of biodiversity loss, which threaten the stability and continuity of ecosystems as well as their provision of goods and services to mankind. Consequently, in recent years much attention has been directed towards the analysis and valuation of the (loss of) biodiversity. The valuation of biodiversity can be approached from an ecological, economic, or combined perspective. This contribution presents an overview of economic and ecological indicators of biodiversity, identifies the underlying valuation approaches, discusses basic concepts and theories, and reviews the respective ap

Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (LUCC) project plays the role of triggers for researchers to explore complicated systems of land-use change and develop land-use change models in decades. After various land-use change models, developed from different disciplines, have been broadly applied to simulate land-use change, the biophysical approach, which can unravel realistic material and energy flows in a land-use change system, is still absent. Although the spatial system modelling, based on the system-based approach, has the advantage of simulating the interactions between natural environment and socio-economic systems, and verifying hypotheses and theories of land-use change and socio-economic metabolism, but it has not received much attention due to its difficulties in dealing with spatial interaction and in integrating different softwares. This paper presents the procedure of using GIS in modelling spatial system to respond the methodological disadvantages of spatial system modeling. For simulating land-use change, an example is shown to demonstrate the capability of Model Builder in GIS software.

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