Chris Smith
Senior Research Scholar
Integrated Climate Impacts Research Group
Energy, Climate, and Environment Program
Senior 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
Kramer, R.J., Smith, C. , & Andrews, T. (2026). The Radiative Forcing Model Intercomparison Project (RFMIP2.0) for CMIP7. Geoscientific Model Development 19 (10) 4447-4466. 10.5194/gmd-19-4447-2026.
Scheifinger, K. , Riahi, K. , Clarke, L., Huppmann, D. , Hasegawa, T., Luderer, G., Smith, C. , Kriegler, E., Rogelj, J. , Nicholls, Z. , van Vuuren, D., van Ruijven, B. , Dekker, M., Verpoort, P., Beath, H., & Sher, G. (2026). Key Benchmarks of Global Emissions Scenarios 2025: Annual update of integrated assessment scenarios and related benchmarks for limiting global warming. DOI:10.5194/egusphere-egu26-12960. In: EGU General Assembly 2026, 03 May - 08 May 2026, Vienna.
Lamb, W.F., Andrew, R.M., Jones, M., Nicholls, Z. , Peters, G.P., Smith, C. , Saunois, M., Grassi, G., Pongratz, J., Smith, S.J., Tubiello, F.N., Crippa, M., Gidden, M., Friedlingstein, P., Minx, J., & Forster, P.M. (2026). Differences in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions estimates explained. Earth System Science Data 18 (4) 2549-2572. 10.5194/essd-18-2549-2026.
Xing, J., Yuan, J., Smith, C. , & Li, D. (2026). Multi‐Century Projections of Dynamic Sea Level Based on an Updated Two‐Layer Emulator. Geophysical Research Letters 53 (6) e2025GL120855. 10.1029/2025GL120855.
Beath, H., Smith, C. , Kikstra, J. , Dekker, M.M., Gidden, M. , & Rogelj, J. (2026). A weighting framework to improve the use of emissions scenario ensembles of opportunity. Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02565-5. (In Press)