Karen O’Brien is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is also co-founder of cCHANGE, a social enterprise that promotes a conscious and collaborative approach to sustainability transformations. Her research focuses on the human and social dimensions of environmental change. She is committed to understanding and engaging with equitable transformations for a thriving world. She promotes integrative approaches to sustainability that recognize how beliefs, values, worldviews, and paradigms influence systems change and social change. Karen’s research focuses on fractal approaches to scaling transformative change and explores the potential for quantum social change in theory and practice.
Her recent books include You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World and Climate and Society: Transforming the Future (with Robin Leichenko). She has participated in four IPCC reports, and was co-chair of the International Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Transformative Change Assessment. In 2021 she was co-recipient of the BBVA Foundations Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Climate Change. She is a member of Academia Europea and in 2025 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
