Garry Peterson

Garry Peterson serves as Professor in Environmental Sciences at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, where he focuses on resilience in social-ecological systems and heads the PhD programme in Sustainability Science. After earning his Bachelor's in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo and Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Florida, he built an impressive career spanning research, education, and policy work. His research integrates three core themes: the dynamic connections between people and nature, resilience dynamics, and future thinking for navigating social-ecological change. As director of the Finance to Revive Biodiversity Programme and co-chair of the Resilience Alliance, he has published over 125 papers in 40+ journals while co-founding three influential open databases: Biosphere Futures, Seeds of the Good Anthropocene, and the Regime Shifts Database. His work in science-policy interfaces includes significant contributions to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Arctic Council's Arctic Resilience Report, and IPBES assessments. Prior to joining Stockholm Resilience Centre, he held positions at UC Santa Barbara, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and McGill University. His impact is reflected in numerous honors, including being named a Web of Science highly cited researcher in 2020 and receiving the Innovation in Sustainability Science award from the Ecological Society of America in 2019. Through his teaching and research, he continues to advance understanding of how social-ecological systems can navigate change while maintaining resilience in the face of global environmental challenges.