With her interest set in the field of environmental sciences, Dr Reinette Biggs’s dream is to draw on the skills and networks she has gained abroad to develop a world-leading social-ecological research centre in South Africa that has a tangible impact on environmental policy and practice.
She started her career with a BSc degree in geography at the University of South Africa (Unisa) while working part-time at the Kruger National Park. This led to several significant opportunities; a key one was becoming involved in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment while working as an intern at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria during her honours and master’s degrees. She obtained her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States, and also spent time with Professor Elinor Ostrom (who received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009) at Indiana University.
Biggs became a postdoctoral research fellow at the newly formed Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden in 2008, where she now holds the position of research theme leader on regime shifts in social-ecological systems. She is also a research associate at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition at Stellenbosch University.
She has a growing international profile with 40 published papers, including articles in Nature, Science, and PNAS, and 25 invited book chapters. She was invited to lead a major review of social-ecological resilience in Annual Reviews of Environment and Resources published in 2012, and is a lead editor of a follow-on book involving 32 authors from leading research centres (published by Cambridge University Press in 2015). She is also co-editor of a special issue on employing complexity thinking in southern Africa, published in Ecology and Society.
Over the past five years she has supervised 10 local and foreign interns, supervised or co-supervised five master’s and one PhD student to completion, and is currently supervising three PhD students.
Some of her many achievements include the Science Faculty Medal at Unisa in 2000, and the CSIR’s Most Promising Young Researcher award for “showing exceptional promise of developing into a world leader in the field of society and the environment” in 2005. She was the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship (one of only 15 in South Africa) to pursue PhD studies in the US, and currently holds a five-year Society in Science Fellowship (one of three awarded globally in 2010) from ETH Zurich. She is the recipient of a four-year Swedish young researchers grant to study regime shifts or tipping points in social-ecological systems, and is a co-principal investigator on a grant to study changes in ecosystem services in South Africa, and has a third grant to study sustainability transformations in Southern Africa.
Her core research focuses on developing an interactive online database and synthesis of social-ecological regime shifts and their impacts on ecosystem services, which has created a wide variety of collaborations with international scientists and research centres, and was used in several policy processes. She believes her research in this field may provide critical insights to help address the sustainability challenges mankind faces.