He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, was co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007, and in 2018 was appointed as Member of the Order of Canada for his research in agrometeorology and for his innovative devices to quantify greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

[1][2] Raymond Desjardins was born and raised on a farm in Carlsbad Springs, Ontario and now lives in Breckenridge (Pontiac), Quebec.

[9] As part of Action Plan 2000, he proposed the GHG Mitigation Program for Canadian Agriculture whose objectives were to increase awareness among the farming community of climate change issues and help producers reduce their impact on the environment.

Throughout his career, Desjardins was a key player in major national and international scientific projects to quantify the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems and their role in greenhouse gas exchange.

This technology, which was featured on the cover of Science,[11] has been used to study some of the major terrestrial ecosystems in North America.

With this aircraft, he was a participant in the NASA funded First ISLSCP Field Experiment (FIFE)[12] over the Konza prairies in Kansas in 1987 and 1989.

These measurements have greatly increased national and international confidence in the Canadian agricultural GHG emission inventory estimates.