On September 19, Cheng Lijing, a researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was awarded the UNESCO Al Fozan International Prize at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France. The award recognizes his contributions in the field of ocean and climate change, which provide scientific support for climate risk assessment and human adaptation and mitigation efforts.

Award ceremony at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France. (Image by Tan Zhetao)

The Al Fozan Prize, officially known as the UNESCO Al Fozan International Prize for the Promotion of Young Scientists in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), is an international award established by UNESCO in 2021. It aims to recognize and reward young scientists worldwide in STEM fields for their achievements in promoting capacity building, scientific development, and socio-economic progress. The prize is awarded every two years to five young scientists. On September 19, 2025, the second edition of the prize was awarded to Cheng Lijing and four other young scientists from Namibia, Peru, Morocco, and Cyprus.

Cheng Lijing delivers an acceptance speech. (Image by Tan Zhetao)

Cheng Lijing, a researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, specializes in ocean and climate change research. Addressing the bottleneck in fundamental ocean data, he has developed multiple core technologies for ocean data processing and constructed a long-term, multi-variable gridded ocean observation dataset widely used both domestically and internationally. His work has revealed changes in key ocean physical parameters such as temperature, heat content, salinity, and stratification since 1960, providing critical scientific evidence for global climate change. He has published over 100 papers with more than 14,000 citations. Since 2018, Prof, Cheng has led the annual effort to track global ocean heat content with an international team of multiple countries. In 2023, he was awarded the American Meteorological Society's "The Nicholas P. Fofonoff Award". In 2024, he received the Chinese Academy of Sciences Young Scientist Award. Currently, he serves as the Coordinating Lead Author for the Seventh International Governmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report (IPCC-AR7), and Co-Chair of the International Quality-Controlled Ocean Database Project.