Chris Smith
Guest Research Scholar
Integrated Assessment and Climate Change Research Group
Energy, Climate, and Environment Program
Biography
Chris Smith is an NERC/IIASA collaborative research fellow based at the University of Leeds (UK), and the Energy Program at IIASA. His research interests include using simple climate models to investigate climate impacts from a wide range of emissions scenarios, and to integrate climate change into energy supply and energy demand decision-making in integrated assessment models.Dr. Smith gained a PhD from the Low Carbon Technologies Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Leeds in 2016, on how solar energy resources may be affected by climate change in the future, spending time in India investigating passive cooling of solar panels to improve performance. From 2016-2020, he worked as a postdoc at the University of Leeds on radiative forcing of climate and helped coordinate the Radiative Forcing Model Intercomparison Project as part of the latest round of global climate modeling efforts. Along with colleagues at Oxford, Dr. Smith co-developed the FaIR simple climate model, and was a contributing author and chapter scientist on the IPCC’s Special Report on 1.5°C and will also be for the upcoming Sixth Assessment Report.
Last update: 26 AUG 2020
Publications
Chim, M.M., Aubry, T.J., Smith, C. , & Schmidt, A. (2025). Neglecting future sporadic volcanic eruptions underestimates climate uncertainty. Communications Earth & Environment 6 (1) 10.1038/s43247-025-02208-1.
Pelz, S. , Ganti, G. , Lamboll, R., Grant, L., Smith, C. , Pachauri, S. , Rogelj, J. , Riahi, K. , Thiery, W., & Gidden, M.J. (2025). Using net-zero carbon debt to track climate overshoot responsibility. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122 (13) e2409316122. 10.1073/pnas.2409316122.
Mathison, C., Burke, E.J., Munday, G., Jones, C.D., Smith, C. , Steinert, N.J., Wiltshire, A.J., Huntingford, C., Kovacs, E., Gohar, L.K., Varney, R.M., & McNeall, D. (2025). A rapid-application emissions-to-impacts tool for scenario assessment: Probabilistic Regional Impacts from Model patterns and Emissions (PRIME). Geoscientific Model Development 18 (5) 1785-1808. 10.5194/gmd-18-1785-2025.
Tsutsui, J. & Smith, C. (2025). Revisiting two-layer energy balance models for climate assessment. Environmental Research Letters 20 (1) e014059. 10.1088/1748-9326/ad9ec5.
Smith, C. , Cummins, D.P., Fredriksen, H.-B., Nicholls, Z. , Meinshausen, M., Allen, M., Jenkins, S., Leach, N., Mathison, C., & Partanen, A.-I. (2024). fair-calibrate v1.4.1: calibration, constraining, and validation of the FaIR simple climate model for reliable future climate projections. Geoscientific Model Development 17 (23) 8569-8592. 10.5194/gmd-17-8569-2024.