Line Gordon

Following her PhD, Gordon was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where she worked with David Molden on the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. Following that, she returned to Stockholm University where she worked as a researcher, in 2006 at the Department of Systems Ecology and then in 2007 at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. She became an associate professor in 2012, and deputy director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2013. She has also been a visiting researcher at CIRAD in France, McGill University in Canada, and STIAS – the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

In 2018, Gordon became the director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.^[3] The Stockholm Resilience Centre is a partnership of Stockholm University and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is a large transdisciplinary sustainability research centre with about 150 staff, which has Masters and PhD programmes in sustainability science. In 2021, she was appointed the Curt Bergfors Professor in sustainable food systems.^[4]

Gordon's research has three main themes: research in Africa, water, and food. Gordon has had long-term research engagement in Africa. Over the past 15 years, she has conducted research in Burkina Faso, Tanzania, South Africa, Senegal, and Ghana. Gordon's research on water has focused on unravelling the critical roles of how the evaporation of water impacts water flows. With her PhD student Patrick Keys, she developed the concept of the precipitationshed.^[5] From her work on agriculture, Gordon moved on to the ecology of the food system, and she has increasingly collaborated with chefs and food producers. She is on the board of the EAT Foundation,^[6] and is one of the authors of the EAT-Lanet planetary health diet,^[7] which developed dietary guidelines that aim to provide healthy nutritious food to the world's people while limiting the damage of farming to the Earth's climate, nature, water.^[8][9]

Gordon's leadership on sustainable and healthy food was noted by the magazine Aktuell Hållbarhet,^[10] which considered her one of the 100 most powerful Swedish sustainability leaders, and she entered their top ten in 2021.^[11]

Gordon's most cited research has been on ecosystem services, food, and water.^[12] Her work has been published across a wide variety of journals spanning topics from global change, to food, and agro-ecosystems. Four of her most highly cited works are:

• Gordon, Line J.; Steffen, Will; Jönsson, Bror F.; Folke, Carl; Falkenmark, Malin; Johannessen, Åse (24 May 2005). "Human modification of global water vapor flows from the land surface". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 102 (21): 7612–7617. Bibcode:2005PNAS..102.7612G. doi:10.1073/pnas.0500208102. PMC 1140421. PMID 15890780.
• Gordon, Line J.; Peterson, Garry D.; Bennett, Elena M. (April 2008). "Agricultural modifications of hydrological flows create ecological surprises". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 23 (4): 211–219. Bibcode:2008TEcoE..23..211G. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2007.11.011. PMID 18308425.
• Bennett, Elena M.; Peterson, Garry D.; Gordon, Line J. (December 2009). "Understanding relationships among multiple ecosystem services". Ecology Letters. 12 (12): 1394–1404. Bibcode:2009EcolL..12.1394B. doi:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01387.x. PMID 19845725.
• Gordon, Line J.; Finlayson, C. Max; Falkenmark, Malin (April 2010). "Managing water in agriculture for food production and other ecosystem services". Agricultural Water Management. 97 (4): 512–519. Bibcode:2010AgWM...97..512G. doi:10.1016/j.agwat.2009.03.017.

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