Steve Lade studies the resilience of social-ecological systems, on scales from agricultural communities to the planet.

Lade is a Centre Associate at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. His research involves a broad range of intensive interdisciplinary collaborations on topics including water resources, Earth system science, corporate and financial sustainability, climate change, biodiversity loss, fisheries, poverty and agriculture. He takes a complex systems approach to resilience and sustainability, integrating mathematical methods and concepts with disciplinary knowledge and approaches.

Previously, Lade was employed at SRC as postdoctoral researcher, researcher and docent (associate professor). His contributions to the Centre included co-leadership of the complex adaptive systems and resilience thinking research stream, theme leader for cross-theme collaboration, and co-leadership of the course ‘Introduction to Sustainability Science’.

Lade holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the Australian National University. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, before joining the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2012. He is now an ARC Future Fellow at the Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University.

Lade’s research in resilience and in global sustainability influences policy and practice around the world. He work co-developing the Earth System Impact score is used to assess the systemic environmental impacts of companies and investors. Pathway diversity, a tool whose development Lade leads, supports planning and evaluation of resilience. The safe and just Earth System Boundaries, which he co-developed, underpin the latest generation of science-based targets for companies and cities.

Lade’s work on safe and just boundaries occurs largely through the Earth Commission, where he is a Commissioner and co-lead of the Safe and Just Boundaries workstream. The Earth Commission is convened by Future Earth and is a part of the Global Commons Alliance (GCA). The GCA’s mission is to empower citizens, cities, companies and countries to become stewards of our global commons.

Lade is also a member of the Resilience Alliance and serves on the editorial board of the journal Ecology & Society.

Awards and achievements

• Developed the pathway diversity approach to planning and evaluating resilience
• Co-developed the Earth System Impact score for the systemic environmental impacts of companies and investors
• Co-developed the Safe and Just Earth System Boundaries to underpin the next generation of science-based targets for companies and investors
• Developed a dynamic social-ecological model of an empirical case, the Baltic Sea fishery
• Contributed to fundamental theory on the consequences of coupling between social and ecological systems on regime shifts
• Extended conventional poverty trap models, with the intention of triggering a step change in research and policy on poverty and its alleviation
• Used a feedback model to highlight the importance of biodiversity in climate change mitigation