He is a transdisciplinary environmental scientist. His positions include;

• the the Co-Founder and Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience Center,
• the Director of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
• the Director of the Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere program of the Royal Swedish Academy.
• the Former Secretary of the International Society of Ecological Economics
• the Co-founder of the Resilience Alliance
• Co-editor of their Ecology and Society journal since 2002.

He has co-authored >200 publications, including

• “Resilience and Sustainable Development: Building Adaptive Capacity in a World of Transformation” (Ambio, 2002),
• Principles of Ecosystem Stewardship: Resilience-Based Natural Resource Management in a Changing World (2009),
• “Resilience Thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability” (Ecology and Society, 2010),
• “Reconnecting to the Biosphere” (Ambio, 2011), Adapting Institutions: Governance, Complexity and Social-Ecological Resilience (2011),
• Water Resilience for Human Prosperity (2014), and “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet” (Science, 2015; with many others).

In 2017, Folke was awarded Norway’s Gunners Sustainability Science Award for sustainable development globally.