Professor Steve Rayner announced as 2020 Paradigm Award winner

13 January 2020

Steve Rayner preferred
Professor Steve Rayner, James Martin Professor of Science and Civilization and Lead Researcher on three current Oxford Martin School programmes, has been announced as the winner of the 2020 Paradigm Award by the Breakthrough Institute.

The Paradigm Award recognizes accomplishment and leadership in the effort to make the future secure, free, prosperous, and fulfilling for all the world’s inhabitants on an ecologically vibrant planet. Past recipients of the award include Mark Lynas, Emma Marris, Jesse Ausubel, Ruth DeFries and Stewart Brand.

Professor Rayner was one of the first Senior Fellows at the Breakthrough Institute, and its notice announcing him as the recipient of the 2020 Award acknowledges him as both a great champion of its work and an even greater influence upon it.

The announcement continues, "it has long been a rule of thumb at the Breakthrough Institute that if something is worth saying about climate change, Steve Rayner said it 25 years ago. That’s not just because Rayner’s work has proven remarkably prescient but also because Rayner understood something fundamental about the issue: almost everything that one needed to know about climate change was already known by the early 1990s."

The Oxford Martin School congratulates Professor Rayner on this well-deserved honour.