Carl Folke

Folke is co-founder and Chair of the Board of Stockholm Resilience Centre. He is also founder and Chair of the Scientific Committee of  the Anthropocene Laboratory, and former Director of  the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Since the mid-1980s he has broken new ground in understanding the dynamic interplay of humans and nature, and between economy and ecology, from management and stewardship of ecosystem services in the seas and on land to the broader challenges of global sustainability. His work has illustrated how progress, prosperity and human wellbeing depend on reconnecting development to the biosphere.

Folke has contributed to fostering a new generation of sustainability science researchers internationally and in Sweden, built internationally leading research centres and institutes, and worked with scholars across the natural and social sciences and the humanities. He has a long record of science, policy and practice collaboration, working with and advising key actors from local landscapes in Sweden to international bodies and transnational corporations. He is genuinely engaged in the arts-science interface, most recently the symphony  RESIL together with composer Jacob Mühlrad. He is a passionate science communicator who regularly appears in media. For example, he participated in the popular Swedish radio show  Sommar i P1, 2025.