The Woods Hole Research Center was established in 1985 in
Woods Hole,
Massachusetts by
George Woodwell. WHRC was one of the first organizations dedicated to fighting global climate change, and Woodwell testified to Congress in 1986 about the dangers of
sea level rise and global warming. The plan for developing the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was drafted at the Woods Hole Research Center in the late 1980s by Woodwell and Kilaparti Ramakrishna. In 2005, Dr.
John P. Holdren became the director and he continued to lead the organization until he was appointed as President Obama's science advisor in 2009. Holdren returned to WHRC as a senior advisor in 2017 after President Obama left office. In 2020, the Center was renamed to the Woodwell Climate Research Center to emphasize the scientific focus on climate change and honor the founder, George Woodwell. The organization's current president is Dr. Robert Max Holmes, an earth scientist who has co-founded and led multiple large river research networks, including Global Rivers Observatory, Arctic Great Rivers Observatory, Cape Cod Rivers Observatory, and Science on the Fly, an initiative that unites the fly-fishing and science communities to study and protect rivers around the world. Woodwell Climate has about 120 staff members. The Center's Gilman Ordway Campus, located on Cape Cod in the town of
Falmouth, was completed in 2003. The building is composed of a renovated summer estate (ca. 1877) and a new wing. The campus is
energy neutral, with renewable power generated by a 100 kW wind turbine, as well as rooftop photo-voltaic power systems. In 2023, Woodwell received a $5 million grant and fellowship from
Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, to develop an open-access resource that will use satellite data and artificial intelligence in order to track Arctic permafrost thaw in near real-time. == Awards ==