NEWS / 2013 ICCG Climate Think Tank Ranking: Announcing the results

ICCG is pleased to announce that its highest-rated think tank is the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC), a private, non-profit environmental research organization based in Falmouth, Massachusetts (USA). Second comes the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) based in Bilbao (Spain), who was ranked first a year ago. Third is  the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) based in Brussels.

This second edition of ICCG’s Climate Think Tank Ranking has incorporated important methodological improvements enabling it to assess more than 200 think tanks specialized in the field of climate change economics and policy, which figured in the 2013 Think Tank Map observatory as of December 10, 2013.

The top think tank was announced on June 29th by ICCG Director Carlo Carraro during the plenary session on “Challenges and Policies for a Low Carbon Future” of the Fifth World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists (Istanbul, Turkey, June 28 – July 2, 2014). The award ceremony will be held at ICCG headquarters on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, in October 2014. The Woods Hole Research Center will be awarded a valuable artistic Murano glass item crafted by a famous Murano Master.

The ranking is based on solid quantitative methodological and analytical data. Think tanks were assessed on a set of 15 indicators structured in three main pillars: Activities, Publications and Dissemination. The Activities pillar measures the influence of research findings on policy, managerial and professional practices, social behavior or public discourse; the Publication pillar measures the research output of a think tank in terms of peer-reviewed publications (quantity and quality) and working paper/reports/policy briefs; the Dissemination pillar was a new criterion in this second edition, which ICCG added in recognition of the importance for think tanks to disseminate their research through international events and web channels.

Two different rankings were built: the Standardized Ranking and the Absolute Ranking. The Standardized Ranking standardized all the think tank activity outputs in 2013 by the number of their researchers, following the criteria of per capita productivity. The Absolute Ranking considered all the think tank activity outputs produced in 2013 in absolute terms (the top think tank in the absolute ranking is the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL), based in Paris, second  comes the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), based in Washington and New York). The results of both rankings are available in the methodological report.

ICCG’s 2013 Climate Think Tank Award to the highest impact think tank working on climate change science, economics and policy was granted, on the basis of Standardized Ranking, to the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC).

The full methodological report is downloadable at this link.

For further information: ranking@thinktankmap.org / +39.(0)41 2700459.