IN CONVERSATION WITH Professor Laura Pereira ON SCIENCE WISE

Professor Laura Pereira is a South African sustainability scientist whose work focuses on climate change, biodiversity, food systems, resilience, and the future of sustainable development. She is a professor at the Global Change Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand and a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. Professor Pereira’s research explores how societies can move toward more equitable and sustainable futures, particularly in the context of climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequality. Her work bridges the natural and social sciences and places strong emphasis on futures thinking, Indigenous knowledge systems, governance, and transformative change. She has contributed to major global science-policy initiatives, including the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and currently serves as an Earth Commissioner working on transformation pathways for sustainability