Director of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Professor Carl Folke is Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Director of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, one of the collaborating partners of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
He took on those positions in early 2007. Carl is currently on leave from his Chair in Natural Resource Management at the Department of Systems Ecology, Stockholm University, a position he has held since 1997.
Carl Folke served as Deputy Director of the Beijer Institute from 1991 to 1996 and Director of Stockholm University’s Center for Transdisciplinary Environmental Research (CTM), 1999 to 2006. He is among the founders of the Resilience Alliance and serves on its Executive Committee. He has been involved in the development of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) and was engaged in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
The work of his research group in Stockholm emphasizes the role that living systems at different scales play in social and economic development and how to govern and manage for resilience in integrated social-ecological systems. In 1995 he received the Pew Scholar Award in Conservation and the Environment and in 2004 the Sustainability Science Award of the Ecological Society of America.
He has co-authored, edited and written well over 200 scientific papers, including 15 in Science and Nature. Carl shares the position as Editor in Chief of Ecology and Society with Lance Gunderson since January 2002 and serves on the editorial board of fifteen international journals.
Carl has been an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2002 and serves on its Environmental Research Committee. He is currently on the Board of the Stockholm Environment Institute, the Scientific Advisory Board of the South American Institute for Resilience and Sustainability Studies (SARAS), Scientific Advisory Board of the STEPS Centre, UK, the Steering Committee of the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, Leeds University/London School of Economics, the Scientific Committee of the Program on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS), ICSU and of the Volvo Environment Prize.
He serves as Associate Faculty of the Earth System Governance Project, and on the Advisory Board to the research group Innovation in Governance, Centre for Technology & Society (ZTG), Technische Universität Berlin, and to the International Network of Research on Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS-Net).
He has, among other things, served as Secretary of ISEE for about 5 years, as adviser to the Swedish Government, and collaborated with several UN organizations on issues like biodiversity, ecosystem services, freshwater management and sustainable cities.
He has also served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), Santa Barbara, California, the Scientific Committee of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) and boards and committees of research councils and various organizations in Sweden.
Carl has organized several major international conferences and workshops; he is in charge of the Stockholm Seminar: Frontiers in Sustainability Science and Policy; he has given numerous invited speaker presentations world wide; numerous public lectures, policy seminars and interviews in media. His research has been widely reported in Swedish and international media.