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Liebig's law has been extended to biological populations (and is commonly used in ecosystem modelling).For example, the growth of an organism such as a plant may be dependent on a number of different factors, such as sunlight or mineral nutrients (e.g., nitrate or phosphate).
Researchers predict that similar cases of resource scarcity will grow more common as the world population increases. [ 20 ] British scholar Thomas Malthus , in his seminal work published in 1798 titled An Essay on the Principle of Population , forecast the potential depletion of the world's food resources due to the growth of human population.
[1] Scarcity is the limited availability of a commodity, which may be in demand in the market or by the commons. Scarcity also includes an individual's lack of resources to buy commodities. [2] The opposite of scarcity is abundance. Scarcity plays a key role in economic theory, and it is essential for a "proper definition of economics itself". [3]
The Simon–Ehrlich wager was a 1980 scientific wager between business professor Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990.
In biology and ecology, a resource is a substance or object in the environment required by an organism for normal growth, maintenance, and reproduction. Resources can be consumed by one organism and, as a result, become unavailable to another organism. [1] [2] [3] For plants key resources are light, nutrients, water, and space to
The depletion of resources hinders economic growth because growing economies leads to increased demand for natural, renewable resources like fish. Thus, when resources are depleted, it initiates a cycle of reduced resource availability, increased demand and higher prices due to scarcity, and lower economic growth. [47]
Water resources, such as lakes and aquifers, are usually renewable resources which naturally recharge (the term fossil water is sometimes used to describe aquifers which do not recharge). Overexploitation occurs if a water resource, such as the Ogallala Aquifer , is mined or extracted at a rate that exceeds the recharge rate, that is, at a rate ...
where N j is the density of species j, R is the density of the resource, a is the rate at which species j eats the resource, d is species js death rate, and r is the rate at which resources grow when not consumed. It is easy to show that when species j is at equilibrium by itself (i.e., dN j /dt = 0), that the equilibrium resource density, R* j, is