Garry Peterson

About me

Garry Peterson is a professor in environmental sciences with emphasis on resilience and social-ecological systems.

His research integrates three themes: the dynamic connections between people and nature, the dynamics of resilience, and how thinking about the future can help people and organizations navigate surprising social-ecological change.  He has approached this work using a combination of quantitative analysis, systems modelling, qualitative analysis, as well as participatory approaches. He is currently Director of the MISTRA international research project Finance to Revive Biodiversity (finbio.org), which is lead by the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Along with publishing over 125 scientific papers, he has 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.

2020-> 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.
2014->    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.
2008->    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.

For over twenty years Peterson has worked in various science policy assessments including the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s Scenarios Assessment, the Artic Council’s Arctic Resilience Report, and IPBES’s Scenarios and models assessment, and its scenarios and models task force. He  is also co-chair of Resilience Alliance, an international science network that also publishes the journal Ecology & Society.

Awards and achievements:
2020    Web of Science highly cited researcher “Cross-Field”
2019    Innovation in Sustainability Science paper award from Ecological Society of America
2008    Sustainability Award for a paper from Ecological Society of America

He has an interdisciplinary training from his Bachelors degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo, to his PhD in Zoology from the University of Florida that focus on Contagious Disturbance.  He has previously worked at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at University of California, Santa Barbara and the Center for Limnology at University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA, and in Geography and the School of the Environment at McGill University in Canada.

For more information visit his website at Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Or follow him on LinkedIn, Mastodon fediscience.org/@resilienceSci or BlueSky resiliencesci.bsky.social