Dr. Laura Pereira

Laura is currently a Professor in Sustainability Transformations and Futures at the Global Change Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, leading a number of projects including as the co-PI on the Future Ecosystems for African Programme. She is also a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre where she is involved in work on sustainability transformations and futures, starting a Formas project in 2021 on 'Seeding transformative futures for people and nature in Africa.' Having completed her DPhil in Geography at Oxford University in 2012, she undertook post-docs in sustainability science at Harvard’s Kennedy School and under the Bioeconomy chair at the University of Cape Town before moving to Stellenbosch University to research development in the Anthropocene. She has subsequently held roles at the Centre for Food Policy, University of London and as a senior researcher working on the Programme on Climate Smart Livestock in East Africa (PCSL) at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University where she was also the co-PI of the CCAFS scenarios project. She is interested in the interface between traditional knowledge and innovation, the role of futures techniques in transformative change and developing innovative methods for knowledge co-production in developing country contexts. Her work uses the food system to unpack broader challenges and solutions to the complexity of governance for sustainability transformations.

Laura is an Earth Commissioner, an expert on the IPBES Task Force on scenarios and model and a member of the FACCE-JPI Scientific Advisory Board and also She maintains an extraordinary appointment at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition at Stellenbosch University.