Professor Naomi Oreskes has won the 2025 Volvo Environment Prize for her influential work on the history of science, climate change, and how scientific consensus works.

Oreskes, a faculty associate of the Salata Institute, is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.

“Naomi Oreskes stands as a leading figure in the contemporary history and philosophy of science, shaping our understanding of how scientific knowledge is collectively constructed and addressing the challenges of misinformation in public discourse,” the jury says in its announcement.

Over centuries, science has advanced from primitive telescopes to particle accelerators, enabling space travel, modern medicine, and computing. Yet, as Oreskes notes, progress is not always linear.

“New findings are always questioned,” the announcement quotes Oreskes as saying. “That’s how science works. Through this process of questioning, we can discern good claims from bad ones, separating the wheat from the chaff, and figuring out what seems to be true about the world.”

“If anything is proven, climate science is proven,” she continues. “Science, as we know it, has been practiced for about 500 years, making it one of the longest-standing institutions on Earth, sustained because scientists have developed methods that typically yield reliable answers.”

Oreskes has been a prominent voice in climate science for years. In 2010 she co-authored Merchants of Doubt, linking corporate climate change denial to earlier public controversies, especially the tobacco industry’s denial of the connection between smoking and serious disease – a link now widely accepted.

Founded in 1990, the Volvo Environment Prize has become one of the scientific community’s most respected environmental awards. The 2025 ceremony, held alongside a seminar, will take place on December 11 in Stockholm.