Peter Cox
Director of the Global Systems Institute
University of Exeter
Professor Peter Cox is an international leader in the understanding of interactions between the land biosphere and climate change, pioneering the inclusion of the carbon cycle and vegetation as interactive elements within climate models, and alerting the world to the possibility of climate change-driven Amazon forest dieback. He was a lead author on the 4th, 5th and 6th Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is currently Director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, having previously worked at the Met Office-Hadley Centre (1990-2004). Peter Cox has been named as a highly-cited author by Thomson-Reuters for every year from 2014 onwards. He was a co-author of the influential 2009 Royal Society Report on Geoengineering the climate: science, governance and uncertainty, and his research group have since studied the impact of SRM geoengineering on both coral reefs (Kwiatkowski et al., 2015), and the Amazon rainforest (Parry et al., submitted). In 2025, Prof. Cox was an awarded a CBE in the King’s Birthday honours list “for services to Science and Climate Modelling”.
