---
id: organizations/stockholm-resilience-centre
about:
  depiction: organizations/stockholm-resilience-centre.jpg
  depiction_credit: >-
    The planetary boundaries, 2026 update. Azote for Stockholm Resilience
    Centre, based on analysis in Sakschewski and Caesar et al. 2026. CC BY-NC-ND
    3.0.
  label: Stockholm Resilience Centre
  description: >-
    Swedish research centre, founded in 2007, that studies how people and nature
    interact; home of the planetary boundaries framework and the Regime Shifts
    DataBase.
  tags:
    - resilience
    - planetary boundaries
    - social-ecological systems
    - sustainability
    - tipping points
organization:
  form: university research centre
  homepage: 'https://www.stockholmresilience.org/'
  country: Sweden
domains:
  - ecology
  - climate
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: About us - Stockholm Resilience Centre
      url: 'https://www.stockholmresilience.org/about-us.html'
    - title: Planetary boundaries - Stockholm Resilience Centre
      url: 'https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html'
    - title: About the Regime Shifts Database
      url: 'https://www.regimeshifts.org/about'
    - title: Stockholm Resilience Centre - Wikipedia
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Resilience_Centre'
  created: '2026-10-26'
  reviewed: '2026-10-26'
  reviewed_by: >-
    Claude, from the sources listed; the founders and funder are from Wikipedia
    only
  status: draft
---
The Stockholm Resilience Centre was founded in 2007 as a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.[^1] Wikipedia names Johan Rockström and Carl Folke as its founders and the Swedish foundation Mistra as its first funder.[^4] It studies how people and nature can live and develop on a planet under pressure, treating the two as intertwined. Its research runs from local food systems to global financial markets, and it trains researchers and works with communities, companies and governments.[^1] It offers a master's programme, a PhD programme and independent courses.[^1]

Its best-known work is the planetary boundaries framework. A planetary boundary is a quantified safe limit for human pressure on one of nine Earth processes: climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion and novel entities.[^2] Crossing a boundary raises the risk of large, abrupt or irreversible environmental change, and the boundaries interact, so pressure on one process changes the risk on the others.[^2] A group of 28 scientists led by Rockström first proposed the boundaries in 2009. The first assessment of all nine came in 2023 and found six transgressed.[^2] Since 2024 the [Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research](/organizations/pik-potsdam/) has used the framework for a yearly Planetary Health Check, which has since found ocean acidification to be the seventh boundary crossed; the picture above is the 2026 update.[^2] The centre also offers an online course (a MOOC) on the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and resilience.[^2]

The centre's page reports that several regions, nations and cities have used the framework to assess their global environmental impact; its example is the 2020 report Planetary Boundaries New Zealand, which places that country's footprint against the safe limits.[^2] For someone modelling a place, that is the main use: a set of global limits against which a city's or region's share of pressure can be measured.

The centre also leads the [Regime Shifts DataBase](/data-sources/regime-shifts-database/), a review of documented cases in which a social-ecological system has shifted abruptly from one state to another.[^3] Such shifts are what this site calls [tipping points](/terms/tipping-points/).