Within days of each other, two Stanford Woods Institute senior fellows who work to better understand climate change received prestigious international honors recently.

Chris Field (Biology, Earth Sciences, FSI), head of the Carnegie Institution for Science Department of Global Ecology, was awarded the 400,000-euro ($543,000) BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award. David Lobell (Earth Sciences, FSI), associate director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, was named to Foreign Policy magazine’s list of 100 “Leading Global Thinkers.”

In honoring Field, a climate scientist who is co-chair of a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group that will release a major report in March, the BBVA Foundation of Spain cited his “visionary research on the global carbon cycle” and his role in “discovering the importance of ecosystems and their effective management in the battle against climate change.” The award recognizes “authors of outstanding contributions and radical advances in a broad range of scientific and technological areas,” according to a BBVA Foundation statement. (Read more about Field.)

In naming to its list Lobell, a 2013 MacArthur “genius grant” winner who works in the field of crop informatics, the Foreign Policy article states that the agricultural ecologist is “helping farmers feed the world.” Lobell, the article goes on, “is working to determine how the world can increase crop yields—that is, get more food without expanding farmland—in the changing environment, while also mitigating long-term damage to the planet.” To do this, Lobell analyzes data on weather patterns, agricultural practices, and resources such as water and soil. Among those also named to the magazine’s list of leading thinkers: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, New York Times writer Thomas Friedman and Pope Francis. (Read more about Lobell.)