Stockholm Resilience Centre

The Stockholm Resilience Centre is an international research centre at Stockholm University that focuses on the resilience of social-ecological systems.

The centre is a transdisciplinary initiative between Stockholm University and the Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It also offers a Masters programmes on social-ecological resilience and has its own PhD Research school.

Research at the Stockholm Resilience Centre is transdisciplinary but organized within the following areas:

• Adaptive governance, knowledge generation and social networks studies how the different aspects of governance and knowledge groups interact to provide resilience against global challenges.
• Governance of marine systems aims to secure the oceans' ability to continue to provide ecosystem services.
• Governing freshwater works on ways to improve freshwater green water and blue water flows.
• Regime shifts focuses on sudden and often dramatic changes in social-ecological systems and the subsequent reorganization
• Global and cross-level dynamics studies the interactions between human activities and Earth's environment, particularly how local and regional drivers can generate global-scale changes
• Urban social-ecological systems studies the challenges posed by urbanization and the transformation of rural, peri-urban and urban landscapes.

Social-ecological resilience

Social-ecological resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to cope with perturbations such as climate change or economic shocks and to rebuild and continue to develop itself. Loss of ecosystem resilience can lead to the consequent loss of valuable ecosystem services, which in turn may lead to rapid and dramatic transitions or shifts in for instance people, ecosystems, knowledge systems, or whole cultures.

The resilience approach is closely linked to the aspect of change, be it gradual or sudden. When change is gradual, things move forward in a more continuous and predictable way. When change is sudden, it is simultaneously disorganizing and turbulent, something which is reflected in for instance climate impacts. There is evidence (what evidence?) that periods of abrupt change are likely to increase in frequency and magnitude which in turn challenges the adaptive capacity of societies.

See also

• Planetary boundaries
• Systems ecology

External links

• Stockholm Resilience Centre web Page
• Official Twitter page
• Official Facebook page
• Beijer web Page
• Stockholm University web Page
• Albaeco web Page

References