Cynthia E. Rosenzweig

Cynthia E. Rosenzweig (née Ropes ) (born c. 1958) is an American agronomist and climatologist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, located at Columbia University, "who helped pioneer the study of climate change and agriculture." She is an adjunct senior research scientist at the Columbia Climate School and has over 300 publications, over 80 peer-reviewed articles, has authored or edited eight books. She has also served in many different organizations working to develop plans to manage climate change, at the global level with the IPCC as well as in New York City after Hurricane Sandy.

Education and academic career Rosenzweig attended Cook College (at Rutgers University) earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in agricultural sciences in 1980. Rosenzweig's focus on agriculture began in 1969, when she and her future husband rented and operated a farm in Tuscany, Italy, picking grapes and olives and raising animals like goats, pigs, ducks, and geese. She decided to return to university to study agriculture, earning a Master of Science degree in Soils and Crops from Rutgers University in 1983. During her Master's, she was hired by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies to study cropland using satellite data. She then earned her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Plant, Soil and Environmental Sciences in 1991. Her work with the IPCC Task Force on Data was recognized when the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Al Gore and the IPCC.

She also currently serves as an adjunct professor at Barnard College, where she leads the Climate Impacts research group, and is also an adjunct senior research scientist at the Columbia Climate School at Columbia University.

Climate research Rosenzweig has been a leader in the field of food and climate change research since the early 1980s. She has led large-scale interdisciplinary research studies on the impacts of climate change in both rural and urban settings. She is also the founder of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), a global and interdisciplinary network of over one thousand researchers studying climate and food systems modeling.

Community engagement and advocacy While at NASA and Columbia's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Rosenzweig has pioneered the study of climate change's impact on agriculture and human cities. Rosenzweig founded the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project in 2010

Publications

An overview of Rosenzweig's research can be obtained at her Google Scholar profile. A complete list of her publications can be obtained from her bibliography on the NASA Goodard Institute for Space Studies website.

C.L. Rosenzweig & M.L. Parry, "Climate Change and Agriculture", 1990

Testimony before Congress, April 17, 2007. Rosenzweig, C., C.Z. Mutter, and E.M. Contreras (Eds.), 2021: Handbook of Climate Change and Agroecosystems: Climate Change and Farming System Planning in Africa and South Asia: AgMIP Stakeholder-driven Research. Series on Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation, and Mitigation, Vol. 5. World Scientific, doi:10.1142/q0259. Rosenzweig, C., M. Parry, and M. De Mel (Eds.), 2022: Our Warming Planet: Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation: Lectures in Climate Change, Vol. 2. World Scientific, doi:10.1142/12312.

Awards Guggenheim Fellow GISS Best Publication Award (2009) Named as one of Nature's 10: Ten People Who Mattered in 2012" by the journal Nature NASA Blue Marble Award (2024)