Four Ca’ Foscari climate scientists make The Reuters Hot List

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice is the most represented Italian research institute in The Reuters Hot List, the list of the most influential academics in the world in the field of climate change, which was recently published on reuters.com. Out of 1000 scientists that work at an international level and 20 for Italian institutions, among which FAO and the European Commission Joint Research Centre  (JRC) in Ispra, Ca’ Foscari is represented by four climate scientists who teach Environmental Economics.  

Enrica De Cian, professor at the Department of Economics, is 591st. She coordinates the PhD programme in Science Management of Climate Change and is principal investigator in the ERC Energy-a project.  

Carlo Carraro, professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, is 609th. He is vice-chair of the Working Group III on the mitigation of climate change of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - IPCC and a member of the Strategic Advisory Board of the Euro Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change - CMCC.

Francesco Bosello, professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, is 874th. He coordinates the section on the impact and policies of CMCC and is co-director of the European Institute on Economics and the Environment.

Carlo Giupponi, professor at the Department of Economics, is 941st. He is Dean of Venice International University and co-coordinator of the Research Institute for Complexity at Ca’ Foscari.

Moreover, CMCC scientists Silvio Gualdi (837th) and Antonio Navarra (841st) are members of the teaching committee of Ca’ Foscari’s Master of Research in Science and Management of Climate Change.

Reuters emphasises that the list is not intended to identify “the best” or “the most important” scientists; rather, it aims to measure and create a ranking based on the influence of climate scientists. In order to do so, Reuters combines three separate rankings. The first ranking concerns the quantity of relevant scientific articles published, based on their titles and abstracts. The second ranking concerns citations, and a mechanism that takes into account the scientists' average citation ratio as compared to the mean for the field of research. The third ranking is the most innovative because it is a measure of a research paper’s public reach. In fact, each publication obtains a score (“Altmetric Attention Score”) according to the references it has received in the media, in public policy papers and social media. Reuters explains that this parameter aims to gauge the influence of scientific research in the lay world.