Garry Peterson

I am professor in environmental sciences with emphasis on resilience and social-ecological systems at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

My work combines three themes: abrupt systemic change, how ecological changes impacts people, and using futures thinking to improve navigating surprising social-ecological change.

I lead an international project Finance to Revive Biodiversity (FinBio.org), which aims to understand how financial activities could look after the living world rather than promote its destruction.

I have also co-founded three open databases to build scientific networks and contribute to open science in these research areas. These databases have been used by researchers, as well as science-policy interfaces including both IPBES, and UN’s Human Development Report. Developing each projects requires building and maintaining a scientific database, as well as organizing a network of international collaborators.

Biosphere Futures (biosphereFutures.net) an online database of over 100 cases of place based social-ecological scenario planning, to facilitate the development of a research community around social-ecological scenarios.

Seeds of the Good Anthropocene project (goodanthropocenes.net) which features a comparative database of sustainability initiatives to compare and analyze the transformative impact of sustainability innovations.

The Regime shifts Database (regimeshifts.org), a database of substantial, persistent types and examples of regimes shifts, persistent, substantial changes in the structure and function of social-ecological systems that alter the supply of ecosystem services.