Dr Line Gordon

Director, Stockholm Resilience Centre and Professor in sustainable food systems at Stockholm University

Line Gordon has over 20 years of experience leading interdisciplinary teams in Sustainability Science. Her leadership focuses on investing in a collaborative, trust-based and creative working culture that enables us to achieve impact, while ensuring that scientific integrity underpins all our work.

Line Gordon’s research focuses on water and food systems as key entry points to build Biosphere resilience and improve governance of social-ecological systems, livelihoods, and public health. Her research is problem-oriented, interdisciplinary, and highly collaborative. She often leads and contributes to collaborations that bridge disciplines and technical skills to advance scientific frontiers. Gordon’s current research focuses primarily on the role of food system transformation for public and planetary health. This work includes leading the Just transformation working group of the EAT-Lancet 2.0 Commission, developing national Swedish food systems scenarios in the Mistra Food Futures programme, and working on gastronomic landscapes.

She has previously done research on livelihood resilience and ecosystem services in sub-Saharan Africa (Burkina Faso, Tanzania, South Africa, Senegal, and Ghana), and on the critical roles of “invisible water flows” across local to global scales, in particular highlighting how global land use change, and evaporation and precipitation interact.

Line Gordon has an undergraduate in biology. She got her PhD in 2003 in Natural Resources Management, Department of Systems Ecology, Stockholm University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She has also been a visiting researcher at University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa, CIRAD in France, McGill University in Canada, and STIAS – the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in Stellenbosch, South Africa. She was appointed the Curt Bergfors Professor in Sustainability Science with a focus on food systems in 2021. Line Gordon serves on many different boards and advisory boards.

ABSTRACT

Building resilience of the biosphere in a patchwork Earth through diverse food systems solutions

Human actions are profoundly transforming the Biosphere upon which humanity depends. While many of these changes have led to significant improvements in human well-being, they have also created a new risk landscape that threatens to undermine the well-being of current and future generations.

At the heart of the interaction between people and the Biosphere are our food systems. In my talk, I will focus on the changes needed from fork to farm to build resilience for long-term human prosperity in the Anthropocene—the era of human dominance over the planet. Drawing on my work with the EAT-Lancet commission on healthy diets within Planetary Boundaries, I will emphasize the necessity of coming together on a global scale to agree on science-based targets for food systems that integrate health, sustainability, and justice (‘resilience of what’). These targets must be general enough to apply globally yet flexible enough to accommodate diverse local contexts. Achieving these targets in an era of unprecedented turbulence will require an improved capacity of all actors in food systems to deal with complex systems and a deeper understanding of how our risk landscape is evolving in this complex, interconnected world (‘resilience to what’).

Creating healthy, sustainable, and just food system futures will demand significant shifts in how humans live within, and interact with, the Biosphere and each other. Envisioning desirable futures that help us reach global targets is a crucial step toward creating such futures. However, we must recognize the diverse patchwork of local and regional contexts worldwide, each with different value priorities. Any global sustainability transition will emerge from the interactions among geographically variable, but interconnected, pathways of change.

Drawing on my interactions with chefs, farmers, innovators, and investors I will highlight why recognizing this plurality of approaches is crucial for building resilience. Diversity, especially response diversity, is at the core of resilience-building. Ultimately, building resilience is about stimulating the imagination of what a good food system in the Anthropocene can be and nurturing the diverse pathways that can lead us to this future in a world that consists of a patchwork of solutions.

I will also emphasize the role of learning and experimentation in navigating this world of fundamental uncertainty and why transdisciplinary science, with strategic partnerships among academia, public agencies, private corporations, and civil society, is vital for resilience-building. I will build on lessons learned from the Stockholm Resilience Centre initiatives, such as bringing together academics and CEOs of the world’s largest seafood companies to foster ocean stewardship.