Stockholm Resilience Centre

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 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, 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.