Joël Guiot is a CNRS researcher emeritus at the European Centre for Research and Training in Environmental Geosciences (CEREGE, France). His main research work concerns the impact of past, present and future climate change on Mediterranean ecosystems.

In 2008, he co-founded the ECCOREV network (Continental Ecosystems and Environmental Risks) to promote interdisciplinarity in environmental sciences, in particular with the social sciences, and in 2012 the OT-Med Laboratory of Excellence to study climate change and natural hazards in the Mediterranean basin.

He launched the MedECC in 2015 with Wolfgang Cramer, to transfer scientific knowledge on climate change to societal actors on both sides of the Mediterranean.

He is one of the main authors of the IPCC special report on the impact of a 1.5°C global warming (published in 2018).