Welcome to the Anthropocene
The symposium ended with the Stockholm Memorandum which concluded that the planet has entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene. It recommended a suite of urgent and far-reaching actions for decision makers and societies to become active stewards of the planet for future generations.

The symposium was based on three scientific background articles which were later published in AMBIO. They explained how the human global imprint is now so large that we risk triggering abrupt or even irreversible changes. Download summary of the articles here (pdf, 2 MB).

The articles helped establish the centre as a key contributor of innovative sustainability research and was closely connected to the work on planetary boundaries. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently urged global society to stand behind the science.

"Since its launch in 2007, the centre has established itself as an international focal point for research on global sustainability. The quality of our research will open up tremendous opportunities for finding better ways to govern social-ecological systems", says centre director Johan Rockström who will lead the centre on a full-time basis from April 2012.

One of the most important educational events last year was the launch of the new Masters' programme on social-ecological resilience for sustainable development. The programme consists of four courses that together introduce students to the essence of resilience thinking and social-ecological research. Curious?

Is feeding nine billion people possible?
Two studies in 2011 showed that feeding a growing world population is possible, albeit difficult. Centre researchers Line Gordon and Jennie Barron co-authored a UNEP report on how to avoid water scarcity and meet growing food demands.

Similarly, an article published in Nature on food production and sustainable agriculture argued that "feeding the nine billion people anticipated to live on Earth in 2050 without exhausting the Earth's natural resources is possible, provided that we adopt a more sustainable food production approach."

One of the most interesting projects initiated in 2011 was a ground breaking initiative to assess resilience in the Arctic. Together with Stockholm Environment Institute, the centre will look at how social and ecological changes interact and the capacities that are available for coping with potential changes.

The centre will also run a project helping European cities reduce their ecological footprint. The Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (URBES) project will address knowledge gaps on the role of urban biodiversity and ecosystem services for human well-being. Perhaps they could learn a thing or two from old Constantinople?

Guilded traps and bottlenecks for change
If there is ever an article that clearly describes the resilience mantra of social-ecological connections, it is the article on guilded traps in the Gulf of Maine. An abundance of succulent lobsters has boosted the area over the past 30 years. But today the gulf is a highly simplified ecosystem dominated by lobsters, rendering the gulf fragile for diseases and the risk of financial meltdown.

Crucial is also how key individuals in a community can be bottlenecks for change. From a rural fishing community on the south coast of Kenya, centre researchers Crona and Bodin used social network analysis to study the links between informal power structures and knowledge sharing and how this affects attempts to curb declining fisheries.

Centre researchers Christian Stein, Henrik Ernstson and Jennie Barron used a similar social network analysis to analyse how social networks affect the governance of water resources in Tanzania. The study revealed certain underlying patterns of how networks are structured and the informal interactions that influence water resources management.

All studies demonstrate the complexity of social-ecological systems and how one thing may lead to another. The question is: are we entering an era of concatenated global crises?

The one that almost got away...
It came late but it was worth waiting for: on 23 December 2011 Science published the most comprehensive study ever undertaken on sea bird breeding and food access. Co-authored by Henrik Österblom, the study showed that successful seabird breeding depends on access to one third of the world's fish.

"The global pattern shows a threshold below which the numerical breeding response declines strongly as food abundance decreases," says Henrik Österblom.

See whiteboard seminar with Henrik Österblom explaining more in detail the one-third-for-the-bird principle: