Albert

Norström

PhD

Head of Knowledge and Evidence of Global Resilience Partnership, Associate Professor

+46 8-674 7034

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Profile summary

  • Social-ecological systems
  • Knowledge co-production
  • Resilience assessment
  • Anthropocene
  • Transformations
  • Marine and ocean risks

Albert Norström leads the Global Resilience Partnership’s efforts to advance knowledge on the role of resilience in achieving long term human wellbeing and the maintenance of planetary life-support systems

Norström currently serves as the Head of Knowledge of the Global resilience Partnership. The GRP is made up of 60+ organisations that have joined forces to work together towards a world where people and places are able to persist, adapt and transform in the face of shocks, uncertainty, and change. The GRP secretariat is hosted by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University.

Norströms background is coral reef ecology, but his ongoing research areas are broad. His current work spans the social-ecological dynamics of ecosystem services, resilience in vulnerable and fragile contexts, the development of positive social-ecological visions for sustainable futures and delivering better frameworks to understand what is meant by knowledge co-production in sustainability research.

Norström is also heavily engaged in the Seeds of a Good Anthropocene project, which is a suite of research activities that aim to solicit, explore, and develop a suite of alternative, plausible visions of “Good Anthropocenes” – positive visions of futures that are socially and ecologically desirable, just, and sustainable.

Norström served as Executive Director of Future Earth's Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) between 2011-2018. PECS integrates research on the stewardship of social–ecological systems, the services they generate, and the relationships among ecosystems, human wellbeing, livelihoods, inequality, and poverty.

Between 2018-2020 he served as the Deputy Director of the Guidance for Resilience in the Anthropocene: Investments for Development (GRAID) programme which was hosted by the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) and funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).

Norström is currently a member of the Scientific Committee of the Future Earth Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS), and a member of the UNFCCC Race to Resilience technical & methodological expert group.

Awards and achievements

  • 2019 recipient of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) Innovation in Sustainability Science Award (together with other co-authors) for the 2016 study "Bright spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene" which was published in 2016 in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Current funding

  • BiodivERsA/FORMAS “Eastern Tropical Pacific reef fish on the move: biodiversity reorganisation and societal consequences”
  • Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs UK Govt Blue Planet Fund “Ocean risks and vulnerabilities in SIDS and LDCs”

Key publications

Folke, C., R. Biggs, A. V. Norström, B. Reyers, and J. Rockström. 2016. Social-ecological resilience and biosphere-based sustainability science. Ecology and Society 21(3):art41.

Norström, A. V., C. Cvitanovic, M. F. Löf, S. West, C. Wyborn, P. Balvanera, A. T. Bednarek, E. M. Bennett, R. Biggs, A. de Bremond, B. M. Campbell, J. G. Canadell, S. R. Carpenter, C. Folke, E. A. Fulton, O. Gaffney, S. Gelcich, J. Jouffray, M. Leach, M. Le Tissier, B. Martín-López, E. Louder, M. Loutre, A. M. Meadow, H. Nagendra, D. Payne, G. D. Peterson, B. Reyers, R. Scholes, C. I. Speranza, M. Spierenburg, M. Stafford-Smith, M. Tengö, S. van der Hel, I. van Putten, and H. Österblom. 2020. Principles for knowledge co-production in sustainability research. Nature Sustainability 3(3):182–190.

Nyström, M., J.-B. Jouffray, A. V. Norström, B. Crona, P. Søgaard Jørgensen, S. R. Carpenter, Ö. Bodin, V. Galaz, and C. Folke. 2019. Anatomy and resilience of the global production ecosystem. Nature 575(7781):98–108.

Bennett, E. M., M. Solan, R. Biggs, T. McPhearson, A. V. Norström, P. Olsson, L. Pereira, G. D. Peterson, C. Raudsepp-Hearne, F. Biermann, S. R. Carpenter, E. C. Ellis, T. Hichert, V. Galaz, M. Lahsen, M. Milkoreit, B. Martin López, K. a. Nicholas, R. Preiser, G. Vince, J. M. Vervoort, and J. Xu. 2016. Bright spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 14(8):441–448.

Jouffray, J., R. Blasiak, A. V. Norström, H. Österblom, and M. Nyström. 2020. The Blue Acceleration: The Trajectory of Human Expansion into the Ocean. One Earth 2(1):43–54.

See all publications

Publications by Norström, Albert