Publications

Publication info: Costanza Conti, Andrew Hall, Kristiaan Kok, Per Olsson, Michele-Lee Moore, Claire Kremen, Amar Laila, Line J. Gordon, Anne Barnhill, Sofie te Wierik, Anna Norberg, Bianca Carducci, Sumati Bajaj, Matthew Gibson, Thais Diniz Oliveira, A. Charlotte Bunge, Tim G. William, Rachel Mazac, Mary Scheuermann, Jessica Fanzo. 2025. A quest for questions: The JUSTRA as a matrix for navigating just food system transformations in an era of uncertainty. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.ONEEAR.2025.101178

A just food system transformation is imperative to meet this century’s goals of environmental sustainability , economic fairness, and equitable social well-being. While considerations of justice are beginning to inform food system transformation debates, there remains a lack of conceptual and practical integration of these two historically separate disciplinary perspectives. This perspective therefore proposes the just tr...

Milkoreit, M., T. Lindahl, M.-L. Moore, M. Nyström, P. Olsson, C. Schill. 2025. Human Cognition and the Anthropocene, Stockholm Resilience Center (Stockholm University), Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Report prepared for the Anthropocene Paradigm Shift Symposium, December 1, 2025, Stockholm, Sweden

Understanding the multiple reciprocal relationships between human cognition and the Anthropocene is emerging as a critical research frontier across the sciences and humanities. This report maps the rapidly expanding but conceptually disconnected landscape of research on how Anthropocene conditions shape the brain and mind—and how human cognition and social processes, in turn, drive and sustain global change. We sketch existing...

Sofia Maniatakou, Pero Olsson, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen. 2024. The role and capacities of large-scale actor coalitions in shaping sustainability transformations. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/mcp5j

Several transnational corporations, investors, international organizations and philanthropies have formed coalitions to respond to global social and environmental challenges. Do these coalitions, consisting of large-scale actors, have the capacities to contribute to the transformations that are needed, or do they perpetuate the same system dynamics that created the problem in the first place? We investigate this question by co...

Per Olsson, Michele-Lee Moore. 2024. A resilience-based transformations approach to peacebuilding and transformative justice. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2023.101392

Moving from a state of war or violent conflict will require a transformation, but there are no guarantees that transformations automatically lead to peace, sustainability, and justice. This review focuses on the temporary phase when a system is in limbo between the existing, dominant state and a new alternative state. We combine insights from a resilience approach to transformations with peacebuilding and transformative justic...

Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Daniel Itzamna Avila-Ortega, Robert Blasiak, Sarah Cornell, Line J. Gordon, Magnus Nyström, Per Olsson. 2022. The lure of novel biological and chemical entities in food-system transformations. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2022.09.011

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

Lam, D., Jiménez-Aceituno, A., Guerrero Lara, L., Sellberg, M., Norström, A., Moore, M., Peterson, G., Olsson, P. 2022. Amplifying actions for food system transformation: insights from the Stockholm region. Sustainability Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01154-7

Food is essential to people and is one of the main ways in which people are connected to the world’s ecosystems. However, food systems often cause ecosystem degradation and produce ill-health, which has generated increasing calls to transform food systems to be more sustainable. The Swedish food system is currently undergoing substantial change. A varied set of local actors have created alternative sustainability initiatives t...

Sellberg, M., Norrby, J., Nowak, A., Rönnquist, L., Olsson, P., Peterson, G., Alvsilver, A. 2022. Rapid Transition Lab - Navigating transformations in times of crises towards healthy, sustainable and just Swedish and planetary food systems. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Dark Matter Labs, and Vinnova. https://doi.org/10.17045/sthlmuni.21275946.v1

The centrality of food to human flourishing combined with how food is currently a source of many social and environmental problems means that many of the broader sustainability challenges can be addressed by fundamental changes to the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Such changes are central to what has been referred to as food system transformations. Transformations require significant changes in multiple di...

Economy and Finance for a Just Future on a Thriving Planet

Eriksson, H., Blythe, J.L., Österblom, H. & Olsson, P. 2021. Beyond social-ecological traps: fostering transformations towards sustainability. Ecology and Society 26(1) 13.

This Special Feature is motivated by the rigorous, and growing, theoretical and empirical body of literature on social-ecological traps. Building on the foundational literature, which describes the context in many of the places where we work, we now look forward and ask how we can better understand and enable the breaking and escaping of social-ecological traps. In this Special Feature we focus on this frontier in the field a...