Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric sciences and director of the Earth System Science Center, Penn State.
Image: Joshua Yospyn
BASEL, Switzerland – , distinguished professor of and director of the at Penn State, will share the 2020 World Sustainability Award with Antonella Santuccione Chadha, co-founder and the CEO of the Women’s Brain Project and global medical manager for Alzheimer’s disease at Roche Diagnostics.
The encourages new initiatives and developments in sustainability with the ultimate aim to foster the transfer from sustainability research to sustainable practices and societies. In this spirit, sustainability is the interdependence between economic, social and environmental concerns for mutually beneficial regional and global development.
The award, funded by the , is conferred upon individual researchers or research teams who have made an outstanding academic or societal contribution to sustainability in general or to a sustainability-relevant issue in particular. The award includes a monetary prize of $100,000, which will be divided between recipients. Mann is a virtual keynote speaker at the 8th Annual World Sustainability Forum, to be held Sept. 15 in Basel, Switzerland, and will receive the award then.
Mann conducts research and publishes on his areas of interest in climate science, including climate change, sea level rise, human impact on climate change, climate modeling and the carbon budget. He is an acknowledged leader in the climate-change community. His work in the area of climate-change science, especially the reconstruction of global temperatures over the past 1,000 years, has advanced the field.
Current areas of research include model/data comparisons aimed at understanding the long-term behavior of the climate system and its relationship with human climate forcing. Other areas of active research include climate simulation using theoretical models, development of statistical methods for climate signal detection, and investigations of the geophysical and ecological system responses to climate variability and the impacts of climate change on tropical storms and extreme weather events.
Mann has been recognized for his scientific work with the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 2019. He received the Hans Oeschger Medal from the European Geosciences Union in 2012 and contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He was elected to the U.S. ³Ô¹ÏÍøÕ¾ Academy of Sciences in 2020. He is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications.
He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union.
Mann has received many awards for science communication. In 2018, he received the Climate Communication Prize from the American Geophysical Union and the Award for Public Engagement with Science from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2017, he received the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication from Climate One. Mann was elected an AAAS fellow in 2015.
Mann communicates about the effects of climate change through a variety of media, including his books, “Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change,” “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines,” and “The Madhouse Effect,” for which he teamed up with Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Tom Toles to explore public perception of climate change. He is currently working on “The New Climate War,” scheduled for publication in January 2021.
Mann also collaborated with author and illustrator Megan Herbert on a children’s book, “The Tantrum that Saved the World.”
He completed his doctorate at Yale University in 1998.
