Editing Ecological yield (section)

== Motivation ==
Ecological yield is a theoretical construct which aggregates information from several physically measurable quantities. It can be used to reason about other ecological indicators such as the footprint. It can also be used as a decision-making tool for governments and corporations.

=== Ecological footprint ===
The idea of [[ecological footprint]]s is to measure the cost of economic activity in terms of the amount of ecologically productive land required to sustain it. Doing this accurately requires estimating how productive the land is; in other words, it requires measuring ecological yield. Conversely, one can extract ecological yield estimates from ecological footprint estimates.

=== Avoiding overexploitation ===
Corporations take out loans to buy equipment and land use rights. In order to pay back these loans, they must extract and sell resources from the land. If the corporation is ignorant of the yield of the land in question, then the [[debt]] instruments may demand a [[yield (economics)|yield]] greater than the ecological capacity to renew. [[green economists|Green economics]] links this process with [[ecocide]] and poses solutions through [[monetary reform]].

Even well-meaning corporations may systematically overestimate the yield of an ecosystem. In the case of multiple corporations bidding for land rights, an economic phenomenon known as [[The Winner's Curse|the winner's curse]] causes the winning party to systematically overestimate the economic value of the land. Typically the economic value comes mostly from the ecological yield, in which case the corporation will overestimate that as well.

Another form of overestimation may come from generalizing data from other ecosystems. For example, the same species of fish in two different systems may have significantly different diets. If its diet in one region consists mostly of algae but in another region consists largely of smaller fish, then it will be more expensive for the latter ecosystem to produce the fish. Yield will be correspondingly lower in the second region. This example illustrates the need for ecosystem-specific study and monitoring in order to reason about ecological yield.