Publications

Joern Fischer, Steffen Farny, Manuel Pacheco-Romero, Carl Folke. 2026. Resilience and regeneration for a world in crisis. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-025-02287-6

Both resilience and regeneration are relevant concepts in sustainability science. Resilience thinking has led to improved understanding of cross-scale cycles of growth and renewal, regime shifts, and planetary boundaries. Regeneration highlights the role of positive, place-based and partially self-perpetuating social-ecological dynamics and seeks to foster mutualistic relationships between human and more-than-human entities. T...

Madlen Sobkowiak, Jan Bebbington, Robert Blasiak, Carl Folke, Henrik Österblom. 2025. Accountability in collaborative settings: understanding inter-corporate sustainability initiatives. Accounting Forum. https://doi.org/10.1080/01559982.2024.2429229

As corporations have come to recognise their role in shaping the biosphere, there has been an increase in inter-corporate cooperation, whereby corporations come together to address issues of common concern. The rationale for developing a collective approach arises from a realisation that “wicked” problems are beyond the capacity of any one organisation to tackle. At the same time, although inter-corporate collaborations exist ...

Craig Allen, Ahjond Garmestani, Tarsha Eason, David Angeler, Wen-Ching Chuang, Jorge Garcia, Lance Gunderson, Carl Folke. 2025. Disastrous consequences: shortcomings of resiliency strategies for coping with accelerating environmental change. Ecology and Society. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-16668-300421

Natural disasters driven by climate change have increased in frequency, intensity, and scale. The consequences of these disasters include the loss of human lives, property damage, increased economic costs, and decreased ability to respond effectively to both abrupt and more gradual disasters. Government responses to such disasters are often based on a desire to rapidly recover to normal, which is understandable, but is difficu...

Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Raf Jansen, Daniel Avila Ortega, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Jonathan F. Donges, Henrik Österblom, Per Olsson, Magnus Nyström, Steve Lade, Thomas Hahn, Carl Folke, Garry Peterson, Anne-Sophie Crepin. 2024. Evolution of the polycrisis: Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-21005

The Anthropocene is characterized by accelerating change and global challenges of increasing complexity and most recently by what some have called a polycrisis. Based on an adaptation of the evolutionary traps concept to a global human context, we explore whether the human trajectory of increasing complexity and influence on the Earth system could become a form of Anthropocene trap for humanity. We identify 14 Anthropocene tra...

Thomas E. Currie, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Laurel Fogarty, Maja Schlüter, Carl Folke, L. Jamila Haider, Guido Caniglia, Alessandro Tavoni, Raf E. V. Jansen, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Timothy M. Waring. 2024. Integrating evolutionary theory and social–ecological systems research to address the sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0262

The rapid, human-induced changes in the Earth system during the Anthropocene present humanity with critical sustainability challenges. Social–ecological systems (SES) research provides multiple approaches for understanding the complex interactions between humans, social systems, and environments and how we might direct them towards healthier and more resilient futures. However, general theories of SES change have yet to be ful...

Johan Rockström, Albert V. Norström, Nathanial Matthews, Reinette Biggs, Carl Folke, Ameil Harikishun, Saleemul Huq, Nisha Krishnan, Lila Warszawski, Deon Nel. 2023. Shaping a resilient future in response to COVID-19. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01105-9

Science today defines resilience as the capacity to live and develop with change and uncertainty, which is well beyond just the ability to ‘bounce back’ to the status quo. It involves the capacity to absorb shocks, avoid tipping points, navigate surprise and keep options alive, and the ability to innovate and transform in the face of crises and traps. Five attributes underlie this capacity: diversity, redundancy, connectivity,...

Thomas Hahn, Giles B. Sioen, Alexandros Gasparatos, Thomas Elmqvist, Eduardo Brondizio, Erik Gómez-Baggethun, Carl Folke, Martiwi Diah Setiawati, Tri Atmaja, Enggar Yustisi Arini, Marcin Pawel Jarzebski, Kensuke Fukushi, Kazuhiko Takeuchi. 2023. Insurance value of biodiversity in the Anthropocene is the full resilience value. Ecological Economics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2023.107799

Recently two distinctly different conceptualisations of insurance value of biodiversity/ ecosystems have been developed. The ecosystem framing addresses the full resilience value without singling out subjective risk preferences. Conversely, the economic framing focuses exactly on this subjective value of risk aversion, implying that the insurance value is zero for risk neutral persons. Here we analyse the differences conceptua...

H. Österblom, J. Bebbington, R. Blasiak, M. Sobkowiak, C. Folke. 2022. Transnational Corporations, Biosphere Stewardship, and Sustainable Futures. Annual Review of Environment and Resources. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-120120-052845

Corporations are perceived as increasingly powerful and critically important to ensuring that irreversible climatological or ecological tipping points on Earth are not crossed. Environmental impacts of corporate activities include pollution of soils, freshwater and the ocean, depletion of ecosystems and species, unsustainable use of resources, changes to air quality, and alteration of the global climate. Negative social impact...

Carl Folke, Nils Kautsky. 2022. Aquaculture and ocean stewardship. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-021-01528-8

In the mid-1980s contemporary aquaculture had emerged as a new way of producing seafood. It was often portrayed as a new technology that would replace overfished stocks and make humankind independent of nature’s fluctuations. Triggered by such claims, we decided to investigate the fast expanding aquaculture industry, which resulted in the 1989 Ambio paper ‘The role of ecosystems for a sustainable development of aquaculture’...

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