Publications

Herrfahrdt-Pähle, E., Schlüter, M., Olsson, P., Folke, C., Gelcich, S. and Pahl-Wostl, C., 2020. Sustainability transformations: socio-political shocks as opportunities for governance transitions. Global Environmental Change, 63.

Faced with accelerating environmental challenges, research on social-ecological systems is increasingly focused on the need for transformative change towards sustainable stewardship of natural resources. This paper analyses the potential of rapid, large-scale socio-political change as a window of opportunity for transformative change of natural resources governance. We hypothesize that shocks at higher levels of social organiz...

Nielsen, K.S., Stern, P.C., Dietz, T., Gilligan, J.M., van Vuuren, D.P., Figueroa, M.J., Folke, C., Gwozdz, W., Ivanova, D., Reisch, L.A. and Vandenbergh, M.P., 2020. Improving Climate Change Mitigation Analysis: A Framework for Examining Feasibility. One Earth, 3(3), pp.325-336.

Limiting global warming to 2°C or less compared with pre-industrial temperatures will require unprecedented rates of decarbonization globally. The scale and scope of transformational change required across sectors and actors in society raises critical questions of feasibility. Much of the literature on mitigation pathways addresses technological and economic aspects of feasibility, but overlooks the behavioral, cultural, and ...

Barrett, S., Dasgupta, A., Dasgupta, P., Adger, N.,W., Anderies, J., et.al. 2020. Social Dimensions of Fertility Behavior and Consumption Patterns in theAnthropocene. PNAS, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1909857117

We consider two aspects of the human enterprise that profoundly affect the global environment: population and consumption. We show that fertility and consumption behavior harbor a class of externalities that have not been much noted in the literature. Both are driven in part by attitudes and preferences that are not egoistic but socially embedded; that is, each household’s decisions are influenced by the decisions made by othe...

Jørgensen, P. S., C. Folke, P. J. G. G. Henriksson, K. Malmros, M. Troell, A. Zorzet, and Living with Resistance project. 2020. Coevolutionary Governance of Antibiotic and Pesticide Resistance. Trends in Ecology and Evolution: 1–11.

Development of new biocides has dominated human responses to evolution of antibiotic and pesticide resistance. Increasing and uniform biocide use, the spread of resistance genes, and the lack of new classes of compounds indicate the importance of navigating toward more sustainable coevolutionary dynamics between human culture and species that evolve resistance. To inform this challenge, we introduce the concept of coevolution...

Folke, C., Österblom, H., Jouffray, J-B., Lambin, E.F., et.al. 2020. An invitation for more research on transnational corporations and the biosphere. Nat Ecol Evol 4, 494, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1145-2

We welcome the interest in our work on transnational corporations (TNCs) and biosphere stewardship. TNCs have rarely been linked to ecosystem dynamics, and even less so considered suitable partners for knowledge co-production in sustainability research. How TNCs shape the intertwined nature of people and planet therefore represents a timely and critical topic and the Correspondence articles by Schneider et al. and Etzion offer...

Garmestani, A.S., J.B. Ruhl, B.C. Chaffin, R.K. Craig, H.F.M.W. van Rijswick, D.G. Angeler, C. Folke L.H. Gunderson, D. Twidwell, and C.R. Allen. 2019. Untapped Capacity for Resilience in Environmental Law. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA

Over the past several decades, environmental governance has made substantial progress in addressing environmental change, but emerging environmental problems require new innovations in law, policy, and governance. While expansive legal reform is unlikely to occur soon, there is untapped potential in existing laws to address environmental change, both by leveraging adaptive and transformative capacities within the law itself to...

Schill, C., J. M. Anderies, T. Lindahl, C. Folke, S. Polasky, J. C. Cárdenas, A.-S. Crépin, M. A. Janssen, J. Norberg, and M. Schlüter. 2019. A more dynamic understanding of human behaviour for the Anthropocene. Nature Sustainability 2:1075–1082.

Human behaviour is of profound significance in shaping pathways towards sustainability. Yet, the approach to understanding human behaviour in many fields remains reliant on overly simplistic models. For a better understanding of the interface between human behaviour and sustainability, we take work in behavioural economics and cognitive psychology as a starting point, but argue for an expansion of this work by adopting a more ...

Boltz, F., Poff, N.L., Folke, C., Kete, N. et.al. 2019. Water is a master variable: Solving for resilience in the modern era. Water Security Volume 8, December 2019, 100048

Resilience is increasingly recognized as an imperative for any prospect of sustainable development, as it relates to our ability to sustain human well-being and progress under the planetary and societal changes that we face now and into the future. Yet, we are ill-prepared to meet this challenge. We neither fully understand nor manage consistently for resilience of the human and natural systems that we must steward through ext...

Schlüter, M., L. J. Haider, S. J. Lade, E. Lindkvist, R. Martin, K. Orach, N. Wijermans, and C. Folke. 2019. Capturing emergent phenomena in social-ecological systems: an analytical framework. Ecology and Society 24(3):11.https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11012-240311

 Social-ecological systems (SES) are complex adaptive systems. Social-ecological system phenomena, such as regime shifts, transformations, or traps, emerge from interactions among and between human and nonhuman entities within and across scales. Analyses of SES phenomena thus require approaches that can account for (1) the intertwinedness of social and ecological processes and (2) the ways they jointly give rise to emergent so...

Nyström, J.-B. Jouffray, A. V. Norström, B. Crona, P. Søgaard-Jørgensen, S. R. Carpenter, Ö. Bodin, V. Galaz, C. Folke. 2019. Anatomy and resilience of the global production ecosystem. Nature, Volume 575, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1712-3

Much of the Earth’s biosphere has been appropriated for the production of harvestable biomass in the form of food, fuel and fibre. Here we show that the simplification and intensification of these systems and their growing connection to international markets has yielded a global production ecosystem that is homogenous, highly connected and characterized by weakened internal feedbacks. We argue that these features converge to y...