(Session 1)Silver Dynamics: An Integrated System Dynamics Forecast Model for Silver

摘要

Many precious metals are considered to be exhausted within the next few decades. Ourunderstanding of the process that leads to exhaustion is limited, often because a staticapproach is used - such approach excludes relevant stocks and flows, feedbacks, delays andchanges in demand and supply. As an alternative, this paper proposes an integrated dynamicmodel which has built and simulated the progress of silver as a resource from lithosphere(source) to dissipation (sink). System Dynamics has been used as method that allowssimulating the behaviour of complex systems: besides, the developed System Dynamics modelalso has generic features that make it potentially adaptable to other precious metals.Analyzing the results revealed that existing prognoses about how long silver might last areunderstated thus suggesting that dynamical modelling is needed in order to make predictionsof future silver availability.