Philippe Ciais ranked the world’s leading climate scientist
On 22 June, the UK-based climate science media outlet Carbon Brief published its ‘Cosmos 500’ ranking of the world’s most highly cited climate researchers. Philippe Ciais, a specialist in the carbon cycle, topped the ranking
A CEA Research Director at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences (LSCE - Université Paris-Saclay/UVSQ/CEA/CNRS), a member of the French Academy of Sciences and a 2025 recipient of a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council, Philippe Ciais is also co-chair of the Global Carbon Project, an international initiative that monitors changes in the global carbon cycle. He has previously contributed to several reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and led the preparatory phase of the ICOS research infrastructure, whose mission is to quantify greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sinks across the European continent.
With more than 1,300 publications to his name and research cited nearly 70,000 times in academic literature, Philippe Ciais is now the world’s most cited scientist in the field of climate change. This recognition, based on data from Project Cosmos, a database containing more than 1.8 million scientific publications on climate, reflects decades of research devoted to the carbon cycle, a key challenge in the decarbonisation of the global economy.