Core Members
Elena Bennett
Associate Professor
McGill School of Environment and Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Canada
Garry Peterson
Professor
Stockholm Resilience Centre,
Stockholm University, Stockholm,
Sweden
Reinette (Oonsie) Biggs
Co-Director, SARChI Chair
Centre for Complex Systems in Transition, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Prof Reinette (Oonsie) Biggs holds a DST/NRF South African Research Chair (SARChI) in Social-Ecological Systems and Resilience. She is co-director of the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (CST) at Stellenbosch University, and also holds a joint appointment at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) at Stockholm University in Sweden. Oonsie is co-chair of the international Program on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) and coordinates the Southern African Program on Ecosystem Change and Society (SAPECS).
Oonsie’s research aims to advance theory and understanding of complex social-ecological systems, specifically how to build resilience to deal with uncertainty, surprise and ongoing environmental and social change. A specific focus of her research are regime shifts – large, often abrupt, long-lasting changes in social-ecological systems that can have dramatic implications for human economies and societies. Through her research, Dr Biggs aims to develop practical theory, methods and insights that can ultimately contribute to facilitating transitions to more sustainable futures in Southern Africa and globally.
Laura Pereira
Researcher
Centre for Complex Systems in Transition,
Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch,
South Africa
School of Environmental and Geographical Studies,
University of Cape Town, Cape Town,
South Africa
Timon McPhearson
Professor and Director
Urban Systems Lab, The New School, New York, NY
Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne
Canada Key Biodiversity Areas Coordinator
Martin Solan
Canada Key Biodiversity Areas Coordinator
Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre Southampton,
University of Southampton, Southampton,
UK
Joost Vervoort
Assistant Professor
Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford, UK
Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Albert Norström
Deputy Director of GRAID
(Guidance for Resilience in the Anthropocene: Investments for Development)
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Per Olsson
Researcher
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Rika Preiser
Senior Researcher
Centre for Complex Systems in Transition, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Stephen Carpenter
Director Emeritus
Center for Limnology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI
Tanja Hichert
Research Associate
Centre for Complex Systems in Transition, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Scenario Planner and Facilitator of Strategic Conversations
Hichert and Associates, Somerset West, South Africa
Frank Biermann
Professor
Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Erle Ellis
Professor
Geography & Environmental Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD
Victor Galaz
Deputy Director and Associate Professor
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Myanna Lahsen
Associate Professor and Senior Research Scientist
Wageningen University, The Netherlands
Earth System Science Center, Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE), São José dos Campos, Brazil
Manjana Milkoreit
Assistant Professor
Purdue Climate Change Research Center, Department of Political Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA
Berta Martin López
Junior Professor
Institute of Ethics and Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research, Faculty of Sustainability, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany
Berta Martín-López is a Junior Professor in Sustainability Science at the Faculty of Sustainability of Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. With a PhD in Ecology and Environmental Sciences, and many years of undertaking applied research, Berta focuses on analysing the dynamics of social-ecological systems at different scales, from local to global. She has been editor of the IPBES Pollinators Assessment and coordinating lead author for the IPBES Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for Europe and Central Asia. In addition, she is Co-Editor in Chief of the ‘Ecosystems and People’ journal and she serves as editorial board member of Ecology & Society and One Earth. She is also Co-Chair of the Programme for Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) of Future Earth together with Oonsie Biggs.
Kimberly Nicholas
Associate Professor
Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies, Lund, Sweden
Gaia Vince
Environmental Journalist
The Wandering Gaia, London, UK
Gaia Vince is a science writer and broadcaster interested in the interplay between humans and the planetary environment. She has a degree in chemistry and engineering masters, and has held senior editorial posts at Nature and New Scientist, and her writing has featured in newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Times and Scientific American. She also writes and presents science programmes for radio and television. Her research takes her across the world – she has visited more than 60 countries, lived in 3 and is currently based in London. In 2015, she became the first woman to win the Royal Society Science Book of the Year Prize solo for her debut, Adventures In The Anthropocene: A journey the the heart of the planet we made. She blogs at WanderingGaia.com and tweets at @WanderingGaia
Jianchu Xu
Principal Scientist and Regional Coordinator
World Agroforestry Centre, East & Central Asia
Distinguished Professor
Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Jianchu Xu is an ethnobotanist working on land systems in coupled social-ecological systems. He is the top 1% of global scientists for the most cited documents in plant and animal sciences in 2017 and cross-field in 2018. His current research includes investigation of early warning signals of global change, ecosystem restoration, forest management, fungi ecology, and integrative tree-crop-livestock systems. After more than thirty years of living and working in eastern Himalayas, he has excellent scientific research networks in Asia. He is coordinating the Mountain Futures Program, which is a global initiative to support knowledge innovations for smallholders in mountain regions worldwide.
Julia Van Velden
Postdoctoral Researcher
Centre for Complex Systems in Transition, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Nyasha Magadzire
Researcher
Centre for Complex Systems in Transition, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Karina Benessaiah
Assistant Professor, Human Dimensions of Global Change
Karina Benessaiah is a human-environment geographer and sustainability researcher whose work focuses on understanding how people adapt to rapid, multifaceted, and cumulative social-ecological changes – often called crises- and the social, economic, political, and environmental transformations that emerge. Dr. Benessaiah uses approaches and methods from global land change, political ecology, ecosystem services and nature’s contributions to people, resilience, and sustainability science to study transformation dynamics in various contexts, including urban and rural systems. She is also interested in the interplay between Arts and Science and how these may contribute to a different, more meaningful knowledge engagement and dissemination. To that end, she co-founded a transmedia cooperative, cinergies.coop, in Athens that documents and supports sustainability and social justice initiatives; one flagship example from their work is the Heterotopies web-based documentary.