BIO
Camille Parmesan (Houston, Texas, United States, 1961) holds a BS in Zoology and a PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin (United States). She has kept up the association with UT throughout most of her career and is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and a Senior Research Fellow in its Environmental Sciences Institute. In 2011 she moved to the University of Plymouth (United Kingdom), where she is now a Visiting Professor in the School of Biological and Marine Sciences. This was followed by another move in 2017 to the Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station (SETE) of the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), as an awardee in the first edition of the French government’s Make Our Planet Great Again program. As of 2022, she is the Director of this center. Parmesan is a longstanding member of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and was a Coordinating Lead Author for its 2022 assessment report. She is a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences and the Ecological Society of America and, since 2019, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.
CONTRIBUTION
Camille Parmesan pioneered the study of the effect of climate change on the geographical range of species, which was pushing them polewards and towards higher altitudes. She started out by studying a particular butterfly species —Edith’s checkerpoint butterfly— and was able to isolate the climate change effect and tease it apart from other possible drivers like habitat loss, pollution or fertilizer use. She then confirmed these attribution results in other butterfly species and, later on, in thousands of animal species both on land and in the oceans.
The paper she wrote with economist Gary Yohe, published in Nature in 2003, on how to ground climate change attribution in robust criteria would become the most cited of all time in the climate change field, with a current tally of 14,000 citations. The impact achieved with the paper led to other research groups, working with species virtually unknown to Parmesan, to enlist her help in identifying the “globally coherent fingerprint of climate change”, as the awardee refers to it, in broader and broader groups of species. The result of one such collaboration was the 2013 paper appearing in Nature Climate Change on marine species worldwide.
Parmesan contends that, in view of climate change, conservation strategies should not target a particular species but rather biodiversity in general. In the near term, we will see climate change impact more and more directly on agricultural and fishing systems, whether farmed or wild. Farming and fishing zones are shifting, diseases too are moving polewards, and higher atmospheric CO2 is lowering the nutritional value of crops.
