Publications

Jonsson, A., Haider, J., Pereira, L., Fremier, A., Folke, C., Tengö, M., Gordon, L.J.. 2023. Gastronomic Landscapes and Biosphere Stewardship: Can Landscapes Be Revitalized Through the Daily Art of Choosing, Cooking, and Eating Food?. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4543275

Food system transformation is an important entry point for global sustainability. As a result of years of increased rationalization and consolidation of food systems, the knowledge, and skills of many actors in food value chains, especially those linked to smaller-scale traditional and artisanal production, processing, and cooking, have rapidly been eroded, despite the resilience that such knowledge and skills could offer. In ...

Olsson, P., C. Folke, and M.-L. Moore. 2022. Capacities for navigating large-scale sustaina­bility transformations: Exploring the revolt and remembrance mechanisms for shaping collapse and renewal in social-ecological systems. In: Gunderson, L., C.R Allen and A. Garmestani (eds.) . Applied Panarchy: Applications and Diffu­sion across Disciplines. Island Press, Washington DC, USA. Pp. 155-180

Chapin, F., Weber, E., Bennett, E., Biggs, R., van den Bergh, J., Adger, W., Crépin, A., Polasky, S., Folke, C., Scheffer, M., Segerson, K., Anderies, J., Barrett, S., Cardenas, J., Carpenter, S., Fischer, J., Kautsky, N., Levin, S., Shogren, J., Walker, B., Wilen, J., de Zeeuw, A.. 2022. Earth stewardship: Shaping a sustainable future through interacting policy and norm shifts. Ambio 51, 1907–1920 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-022-01721-3

Transformation toward a sustainable future requires an earth stewardship approach to shift society from its current goal of increasing material wealth to a vision of sustaining built, natural, human, and social capital—equitably distributed across society, within and among nations. Widespread concern about earth’s current trajectory and support for actions that would foster more sustainable pathways suggests potential social ...

Österblom, H., Folke, C., Rocha, J. et al. Scientific mobilization of keystone actors for biosphere stewardship. Sci Rep 12, 3802 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-07023-8

The biosphere crisis requires changes to existing business practices. We ask how corporations can become sustainability leaders, when constrained by multiple barriers to collaboration for biosphere stewardship. We describe how scientists motivated, inspired and engaged with ten of the world’s largest seafood companies, in a collaborative process aimed to enable science-based and systemic transformations (2015–2021). CEOs face...

Economy and Finance for a Just Future on a Thriving Planet

Biggs, R., Clements, H., de Vos, A., Folke, C., Manyani, A., Maciejewski, K., Martín-López, B., Preiser, R., Selomane, O. & Schlüter, M. 2021. What are social-ecological systems and social-ecological systems research? In: Biggs et al. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems, Taylor & Francis Group, pp 3–26.

This chapter is part of The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems which provides a synthetic guide to the range of methods that can be employed in social-ecological systems (SES) research. The book is primarily targeted at graduate students, lecturers and researchers working on SES, and has been written in a style that is accessible to readers entering the field from a variety of different disci...

Levin, S.A., Anderies, J., Adger N., Barrett, S., Bennett, E., Cardenas, J.C., Carpenter, S.R., Crepin, A.-S., Ehrlich, P.R., Fischer, J., Folke, C., Kautsky, N., Kling, C., Nyborg, K., Polasky, S., Scheffer, M., Segerson, K., Shogren, J., van den Bergh, J., Walker, B.H., Weber, E.U., and Wilen, J. 2021. Governance in the face of extreme events: Lessons from evolutionary processes for structuring interventions and the need to go beyond. Ecosystems doi.org/10.1007/s10021-021-00680-2.

The increasing frequency of extreme events, exogenous and endogenous, poses challenges for our societies. The current pandemic is a case in point; but "once-in-a-century" weather events are also becoming more common, leading to erosion, wildfire and even volcanic events that change ecosystems and disturbance regimes, threaten the sustainability of our life-support systems, and challenge the robustness and resilience of societi...

Folke, C. & Kautsky, N. 2021. Aquaculture and ocean stewardship. Ambio doi.org/10.1007/s13280-021-01528-8

Sumaila, U., Skerritt, D., Schuhbauer, A., Villasante, S., Cisneros-Montemayor, A., Sinan, H., et.al. 2021. WTO must ban harmful fisheries subsidies. Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.abm1680

Sustainably managed wild fisheries support food and nutritional security, livelihoods, and cultures. Harmful fisheries subsidies—government payments that incentivize overcapacity and lead to overfishing—undermine these benefits yet are increasing globally. World Trade Organization (WTO) members have a unique opportunity at their ministerial meeting in November to reach an agreement that eliminates harmful subsidies. We—a group...

Folke, C., Haider, L., Lade, S., Norström, A., Rocha, J.. 2021. Resilience and social-ecological systems: A handful of frontiers. Global Environmental Change. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102400

Fifteen years have passed since the publication in Global Environmental Change of the article Resilience: the emergence of a perspective of social-ecological systems analyses (Folke 2006). Resilience of social-ecological systems, now widely spread, is found in many academic fields, contributing exciting work and novel insights. Social-ecological resilience thinking has become part of practice, policy, and business, ranging fr...