Stockholm Resilience Centre

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Stockholm Resilience Centre
AbbreviationSRC
FormationJanuary 1, 2007;18 years ago (2007-01-01)
TypeResearch institute
HeadquartersStockholm, Sweden
Official language
English
Director
Line Gordon
Website stockholmresilience.org

Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), explores how people and nature can live and develop on a planet under pressure. The centre is a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. [1]

Contents

The centre states that its mission [2] is to:

Stockholm Resilience Centre has a particular focus on social-ecological resilience, where humans and nature are studied as an integrated whole. [3] The centre advises policymakers and industry on ecosystem management and long-term sustainable and equitable development in Europe and elsewhere around the world. [4] [5]

Organisation

Stockholm Resilience Centre has approximately 160 staff. [6] Line Gordon is director of the centre since 2018, following Johan Rockström. [7] The centre has many productive and influential researchers.

The Centre is governed by a board with additional strategic advice provided by two international boards. There is a scientific advisory council of leading sustainability researchers to provide advice on scientific development of the Centre, which is led by Elena Bennett from McGill University. [8] There is also an international advisory board that provides strategic advice to the Centre in its efforts to have global impact within science, business, policy and practice, currently led by Jim Balsillie. [9]

The centre's researchers are among the most cited researchers in the world. In 2024, five centre's researchers were included in the prestigious Clarivate list of the world’s most cited researchers. [10] This distinguished group includes: Sarah Cornell, Thomas Elmqvist, Max Troell, Johan Rockström and Carl Folke. [11]

Research

Stockholm Resilience Centre consists of six focus areas which concentrate research on specific angles of sustainability science, resilience and social-ecological systems:

Education

Along with a PhD programme in Sustainability Science SRC also operates a Masters programme in Social-Ecological Resilience for Sustainable Development and a number of specialised courses, such as its executive programme in resilience thinking [18] aimed at CEOs and chairpersons and a number of Stockholm University courses focused on global change, sustainable business, social-ecological resilience and systems theory. [19]

Notable work

The nine planetary boundaries as of 2015 Planetary-Boundaries (2015).jpg
The nine planetary boundaries as of 2015

The Planetary Boundaries

In 2009, Stockholm Resilience Centre's then director Johan Rockström led an international group of 28 leading academics, who proposed a new Earth system framework, the "planetary boundaries", for government and management agencies as a precondition for sustainable development. The framework posits that Earth system processes on the planet have boundaries or thresholds that should not be crossed. The extent to which these boundaries are not crossed marks what the group calls the safe operating space for humanity. The group identified nine "planetary life support systems" essential for human survival and attempted to quantify just how far seven of these systems have been pushed already. They then estimated how much further we could go before our survival is threatened; beyond these boundaries, there is a risk of "irreversible and abrupt environmental change" which could make Earth less habitable. [20] Boundaries can help identify where there is room and define a "safe space for human development", which is an improvement on approaches that aim to minimize human impacts on the planet. [20]

In 2015, the scientists published an update. They changed the name of the boundary "loss of biodiversity" to "change in biosphere integrity" meaning that not only the number of species but also the functioning of the biosphere as a whole is important, and "chemical pollution" to "novel entities," including in it not only pollution but also organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and microplastics. According to the 2015 update, four of the boundaries have been exceeded: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change and altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen). [21] By now, the concept of planetary boundaries had gained significant international media attention and was covered in, among others, the Economist [22] and National Geographic. [23]

In 2022, they concluded that the novel entity boundary has been exceeded. [24]

In 2023, scientists assessed all nine planetary boundaries for the first time. They found that six of these boundaries have been crossed, with four of them posing a high risk. Additional to the crossed boundaries assessed in 2015, the freshwater change and novel entities boundaries have been crossed. [25] A new study also shows the broad impact that the Planetary Boundaries framework has on society and science. [26]

Development studies scholars have been critical of aspects of the framework, arguing that its adoption could place on the Global South. Proposals to conserve a certain proportion of Earth's remaining forests can be seen as rewarding the countries such as those in Europe that have already economically benefitted from exhausting their forests and converting land for agriculture. In contrast, countries that have yet to industrialize are asked to make sacrifices for global environmental damage they may have had little role in creating. [27]

Breaking Boundaries documentary

In 2021 Netflix released the documentary film Breaking Boundaries: the Science of Our Planet, directed by Jonathan Clay and presented by Sir David Attenborough and Johan Rockström. The 75-minute production follows the scientific journey of Rockström and his team's discovery of the nine planetary boundaries. [28] Alongside the film's release, a book of the same name was published, with a foreword from Greta Thunberg. [29]

The Planetary Health Diet

The Planetary Health Diet is a flexitarian diet developed by the EAT-Lancet Commission as part of a report released in The Lancet on 16 January 2019. Stockholm Resilience Centre was the scientific coordinator of the report. [30]

The aim of the planetary health diet is to create new dietary paradigms to: [31]

The report promotes diets consisting of a variety of plant-based foods, with low amounts of animal-based foods, refined grains, highly processed foods, and added sugars, and with unsaturated rather than saturated fats. [30]

While the report received significant media coverage, including features in the Guardian, [32] CNN [33] and BBC, [34] it was also criticized on social media for advocating eating less meat. [35] Later on, it was found that this critique was part of a concerted campaign started by pro-meat advocates a few days ahead of the launch of the report. [36]

Doing business within Planetary Boundaries

The report “Doing business within Planetary Boundaries” was launched in 2024 by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. [37] It was presented at Norrsken, Europes biggest hub for tech and impact, in Barcelona. [38] The report provides a tool that allows businesses to report their environmental impacts more accurately and with less effort. To do this the report presents two variables:

Other

Specialist programmes

References

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  2. "New Mission". stockholmresilience.org. 2 September 2020. Retrieved 5 October 2020.
  3. Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere: Funders and Partners – Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 8 May 2017.
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