Tag Archives: Stockholm Resilience Centre

General

Two new jobs at Stockholm Resilience Centre

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Stockholm Resilience Centre has two new Associate Senior Lecturer in environmental sciences positions it is looking to fill.  Application deadline is  22 January 2011.

Associate Senior Lecturer with emphasis on ecosystem-based management of the Baltic Sea

This position includes analysis of social-ecological systems that integrates ecology and management-related societal functions, including economy.

Main tasks will be research and coordination of research on ecosystem-based management within the programme Baltic Ecosystem Adaptive Management and to some extent teaching and supervising.

Required qualifications include a PhD or equivalent which qualifies for employment as an associate university lecturer. Preference is given to candidates awarded their degree no more than five years before the closing date for applications.

Download full vacancy announcement herePDF (pdf, 890 kB)

Associate Senior Lecturer with emphasis on modeling of social-ecological systems
This position involves modelling, analysis and simulation of social-ecological systems, thus integrating several different ecological and/or socioeconomic factors and issues, including resilience.

Main tasks include research, to some extent teaching and supervision, and management of a modelling and visualisation lab.

Required qualifications include a PhD or equivalent which qualifies for employment as an associate university lecturer. Preference is given to candidates awarded their degree no more than five years before the closing date for applications.

Download full vacancy announcement here PDF (pdf, 860 kB)

Ideas

Stockholm Resilience Centre talks on iTunes

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Sturle Hauge Simonsen from Stockholm Resilience Centre has told me that you can freely download Centre seminars and presentations from iTunes. Many shorter presentations are available on YouTube.

Speakers in the iTunes talks includes a diverse group of well known scientists such as Elinor Ostrom, Buzz Holling, Claire Kremen, Pavan Sukhdev, Frances Westley, Terry Hughes, Karen O’Brien, and Johan Rockström.  In total there are over 50 talks by a multi-disciplinary set of sustainability science researchers, including me.

You can download iTunes for free here. Once you have downloaded and opended iTunes, you can find all the SRC’s lectures and seminars by going to the iTunes store, going to podcasts, and searching for Stockholm Resilience Centre in the top right corner of iTunes.

Visualization

Johan Rockström at TED on planetary boundaries

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Johan Rockström, from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, talks at TED about strategies people can use to transform our civilization (citing work on Latin American agriculture, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, Kristianstad in Sweden, and Elinor Ostrom‘s work) to enable the Earth System to remain within planetary boundaries.

Ethan Zuckerman provides a summary of the talk here.

General

New PHD opportunities at Stockholm Resilience Centre

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There are two new PhD positions at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.  The first is to work with me, Garry Peterson, and then second to work with Line Gordon.

Position one: Mapping ecological regime shifts

We are looking for a PhD student who is excited to devel-op innovative methods as part of an transdisciplinary research team at the Stockholm Re-silience Centre. This team includes several researchers, PhD students, and Masters students, as well as our international collaborators.

Ecosystems can shift from being organized around one set of ecological processes and patterns to another. Research has identified an increasing number of such ecological re-gime shifts in systems as diverse as boreal forests, coral reef, shallow lakes, and rangel-ands.

These ecological regime shifts are being documented by the regime shifts database project (www.regimeshifts.org).

This project will work with the regime shift database project to build models of particular regime shifts that allow us to estimate the probability of regime shifts across landscapes.

The research aims to directly address a key research gap identified by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and contribute to future ecologi-cal assessments.

Read more here

Position two: Adapting to climate change: the re-greening of the Sahel as a potential success case
We seek to recruit 1-2 PhD candidate(s) for participation in a trans-disciplinary research project analyzing social-ecological systems in Niger and/or Burkina Faso in the Sahel.

The project addresses the current trend of increasing biomass production (here referred to as the re-greening) in the Sahel, and aims to improve the understanding of how to adapt to, and cope with, climate variability and change in marginal environments.

The student(s) will be involved in comparative analyses of different villages and/or landscape segments in the Sahel that have responded to climate variability in contrasting ways (e.g. situated at different places along a degraded re-greened continuum) to improve the understanding of why a positive change has taken place in some areas, while not in others.

The work will include 1) analysis of the historical development that have led to the current re-greened/degraded state in respective area; 2) analysis of quantity and quality of ecosystem services currently generated in the landscape, including the influence of this on poverty dynamics; and 3) analysis of potential development trajectories in the future, through e.g. scenario planning.

Read more here

General

Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize in Economics

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Prize Award Ceremony

Elinor Ostrom receiving her Prize from His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden at the Stockholm Concert Hall, 10 December 2009. Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 2009. Photo: Frida Westholm

Our colleague, Lin Ostrom was just in Stockholm to receive her Nobel Prize. I was fortunate to be able to congratulate Lin Ostrom before her Nobel Lecture.  Her prize Lecture, Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems » (28 min.  ) is available on the Nobel website.

Her colleagues at Indiana University have been blogging her Stockholm trip, providing some insight into her very busy ittineary, which has included sidetrips to COP 15 in Copenhagen and Uppsala.

Lin Ostrom is on the board of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and they write:

A sparklingly happy Elinor Ostrom arrived in Stockholm to receive the prize at the Nobel ceremony on the 10t December. Professor Ostrom, who currently serves on the board of  Stockholm Resilience Centre, is a long time research associate of Stockholm Resilience Centre and its partner the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics.

“We need serious people with good theories to look at environmental problems and Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Beijer Institute has gathered extraordinary people to do this”, says Elinor Ostrom enjoying the traditional Nobel reception at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

General

Johan Rockstrom Sweden’s Person of Year

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Johan Rockström speaks during the 2007 Resilience conference in Stockholm Photo: J. Lokrantz

Congratulations to my colleague, Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and SEI, who has been named Swedish Person of the Year by FOKUS magazine

for his engaging and exciting work for sustainable development.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre has a press release about the award in which Johan states:

I am immensely honored to receive this award, above all on behalf of my many colleagues whose work deserves this attention. Both SEI and Stockholm Resilience Centre conduct enormously important work to support sustainable development in both rich and poor countries. This also includes the importance of actively communicating their work to policymakers and society as a whole, Rockström says.

General

Stockholm Resilience Centre is looking for Seven new PhD students

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The Stockholm Resilience Centre a joint centre of the Stockholm University, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science and the Stockholm Environment Institute, is looking for seven transdisciplinary PhD students who are interested in working on resilience issues in sustainability science.

The positions are:

These students will all be part of the new Resilience Graduate School which will help build the next generation of transdisciplinary thinkers and doers in sustainability science. The program will explore resilience theory and research methodologies, adaptive governance, and social-ecological transformation.

The application procedures are formally run by collaborating departments at Stockholm University.  Final date for applications  is between May 2-4th, 2009.

For further information on the PhD positions see:
www.stockholmresilience.su.se/graduateschool

Ideas, Visualization

Stockholm Whiteboard Seminars

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Fredrik Moberg from Albaeco and Stockholm Resilience Centre has developed a new video seminar concept with Sturle Simonsen called the “Stockholm Whiteboard Seminars”. He says:

The idea is to get away from seminars loaded with lengthy and flashy PowerPoints and go back to basics. So, take the opportunity to get a short and close encounter with a top scientist in the field of sustainable development, who uses the whiteboard to explain an important concept or recent research insight just for you! So, what is this Whiteboard Seminar concept all about? The criteria we use are:

• The scientist has a maximum of 7 minutes to present
• The presentation must be done in an as easy, clear and convincing way possible
• It should be related to people’s everyday life or a current topic in media/politics
• The presentation should evolve around a simple model or a drawing
• The presenter is only allowed to use a black whiteboard pen

The first two videos in the series are below the break…

Continue reading →

General

PhD position at Stockholm Resilience Centre

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The research program “Governance of the Baltic Sea – a response to ecological regime shifts” at the Baltic Nest Institute and Stockholm Resilience Center is looking for a Political Science PhD student.

The project runs from 2009-2012, andaims to develop guidelines for adaptive  management of both coastal and marine environments (with special focus on the Baltic Sea). The application deadline is very soon – Feb 14th, 2009.

The project is run by associate Professor Christoph Humborg and Professor Carl Folke.  For more information about the research project and information on the position contact
Associate Professor Christoph Humborg (christoph.humborg @ itm.su.se).

More information on training at postgraduate level in science and application procedure are available on
http://www.statsvet.su.se/Student/ansokan_forskarutb.htm

The project is described below:

Continue reading →

General

PhD position at Stockholm Resilience Centre

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As mentioned earlier on this blog, Line Gordon and I are looking for a PhD student to be part of an international research project.

The PhD position is at Stockholm University (Sweden) in Physical Geography, but the student will be based at both Physical Geography and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

The student will develop a conceptual framework and empirical methods to investigate how globally driven hydrological changes could alter the social-ecological resilience of Arctic ecosystems. This research includes reviewing evidence for possible hydrologically triggered abrupt threshold changes or regime shifts in Arctic ecosystems, the synthesis of existing social, ecological and physical data to map social-ecological resilience in the Arctic, and the construction of minimal social-ecological models of Arctic regime shifts.

The proposed starting date is January 1, 2009 (although this can be negotiated). Applications will be taken until Oct 31th, 2008.

For more information see my previous post.

The official job ad and details are here.