Laura Pereira

Pereira is a member of the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes project and leads two current projects, the first is a Formas funded project entitled “Seeding transformative futures for people and nature in Africa ” and the other is an H2020 project in collaboration with EAT called “Foodtrails”. She also works with Guillermo Ortuño Crespo on a small project to realise transformative scenarios for the high seas using the Nature Futures Framework. Pereira co-ordinates the SRC’s module of the Bosch Stiftung Transformational Leadership Post-doc Academy. She is also actively involved in MSc student supervision and gives a lecture on sustainability transformations as part of the MSc course. Pereira holds a DPhil in Geography and Environmental Science from the University of Oxford. She completed her BSc (Hons) majoring in Zoology, Ecology and Law at the University of the Witwatersrand and read for an MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She has worked as a post-doctoral fellow for the Future Agricultures Consortium at the Institute of Development Studies, as a Giorgio Ruffolo and Gundle fellow in sustainability science at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and as a post-doc at the University of Cape Town under the Bioeconomy chair. Pereira was a lecturer at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (CST) at Stellenbosch University under the GRAID project and a research fellow at the Centre for Food Policy, City University of London. She is currently based between the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University and the SRC. Pereira also has an extraordinary appointment at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition at Stellenbosch University. Pereira was a Co-ordinating Lead Author for UN Environment’s GEO-6 Assessment and a Lead Author for the GEO-6 Africa Regional Assessment. She was also a Lead Author for the IPBES Regional Assessment for Africa, is the review editor for the IPBES Values Assessment and is a member of the IPBES Task Force on scenarios and modelling. She is also a member of the Earth Commission’s working group 4 on Transformations. Pereira is a member of the London Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) and an active member of the EAT Forum. She is a and a member of the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) and a co-PI of the CGIAR’s CCAFS (Climate Change and Food Security) scenarios team. She has been elected to sit on the scientific advisory board of Europe’s FACCE Joint Programming Initiative.

Awards and achievements

• Plenary speaker Global Food Security Conference, December 2020
• Invited speaker at WWF Fuller Symposium on Systems Thinking, 6th December 2018, Washington D.C
• ICSU Young Scientist/World Social Science and Future Earth Fellow
• National Research Foundation (NRF), South Africa: Y1 rating
• Giorgio Ruffolo and Gundle Fellowship in Sustainability Science at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
• Oxford University Clarendon Scholarship
• Commonwealth Scholarship