Beatrice is a Professor of Sustainability Science. She is the Science Director at the Stockholm Resilience Center and the Executive Director of the research program Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere housed at the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.
She received her PhD in Systems Ecology in 2006, and the first decade of her academic career included various aspects of fisheries governance in small-scale fisheries in developing countries, ranging from East Africa to Philippines.
Her focus then was on understanding barriers to the development of institutions that promote both sustainable resource governance and equitable resource distribution and poverty alleviation. This work involved understanding the role of traders (middlemen) in small-scale fisheries value chains play for perpetuating unsustainable dynamics in small-scale fisheries as a result of patron-client type relationships in the market-place. Later she worked to assess the effects of international seafood trade on local communities/fisheries outcomes. Throughout her career, she has combined her background in marine ecology with methods from sociology, political science, political ecology and economics; ranging from social network analysis, to value chain analysis and purely qualitative analysis, such as ethnography.
More recently, the scope of her work has widened to encompass multiple aspect of the wider food system, yet maintaining a particular focus on aquatic food production, consumption and trade, as well as an examination of corporate financial investments that drive norms and practices of actors across the food system, and other sectors.
She has been involved in multiple initiatives and programs o champion science-business collaborations to support transforming towards sustainability, including dialogues with the financial sector and the global seafood sector (SeaBOS). She contributed to the EAT-Lancet commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems, and most recently she co-chaired the Blue Food Assessment; an international initiative bringing together an interdisciplinary team of over 100 scientists to support decision-makers in evaluating opportunities, tradeoffs and implementing solutions to build healthy, equitable and sustainable food systems. Beatrice has a passion for finding ways of asking research question, and conducting rigorous science that can still be relevant to policy-makers and practitioners. Her latest projects involve a 10 year transdisciplinary program with an aim and mandate to co-create research that balances the environment, equity and economics, to inform a transformation of investment practices. It also includes an 8 year program to deliver research that can support the consideration and incorporation of meaningful biodiversity measures into corporate financial decision making.