Braneon, Christian
Christian Braneon
Dr. Christian V. Braneon is a climate scientist focusing on urban climate solutions. He is the Head of Climate Justice at Carbon Direct, a company built to help enterprises drive climate action. He leads the integration of environmental and climate justice into the company’s culture, operations, and services across the carbon management industry. He also co-leads the Environmental Justice and Climate Just Cities Network at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He is the Co-Chair of the New York City Panel on Climate Change. Dr. Braneon is on the newly formed Center for Climate Solutions’ Advisory Committee, established by the Trust for Governors Island, to further New York City’s efforts to research and demonstrate urban climate solutions and advance education and workforce development for New Yorkers in environmental fields. Previously, Dr. Braneon was a climate scientist in the Climate Impacts Group of NASA GISS and as Co-Director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s inaugural Environmental Justice Academy for community leaders. He was selected as one of four international recipients of the AXA Award for Climate Science in 2021.
“For every climate change mitigation strategy, whether it’s clean energy or carbon removal, we need to quantitatively assess how we are thinking about environmental and climate justice. Similar to the physical sciences and the geosciences, it is critical to understand that environmental and climate justice is also a data-driven field.” - Christian Braneon, 2023
McClain, S., Kruczkiewicz, A., Ndugwa, R., Braneon, C., Bader, D., Bazo, J., & Owen, M. (2022). Building Risk‐Informed Communities: Case Studies on the Applications of Earth Observation Data. Earth Observation Applications and Global Policy Frameworks, 119-132.
Brennan, M. M., Whitmee, S., Braneon, C. V., Meinsma, N., & Green, R. (2022). Sea Level Rise and City-Level Climate Action. European Journal of Environment and Public Health, 6(2), em0111.
McConnell, K., Braneon, C. V., Glenn, E., Stamler, N., Mallen, E., Johnson, D. P., … & Rosenzweig, C. (2022). A quasi-experimental approach for evaluating the heat mitigation effects of green roofs in Chicago, Illinois. Sustainable Cities and Society, 76, 103376.
Doust, K., Wejs, A., Zhang, T. T., Swan, A., Sultana, N., Braneon, C., … & Fatorić, S. (2021). Adaptation to climate change in coastal towns of between 10,000 and 50,000 inhabitants. Ocean & Coastal Management, 212, 105790.
Braneon, C., Field, R., Seto, E., Chen, K., McConnell, K., Robinson, L., & Richardson, S. (2021). Towards disentangling lockdown-driven air quality changes in the northeastern U.S. Journal of Extreme Events, 8(02), 2150017.
Dr. Christian Braneon grew up in Houston, TX. Raised in a single-parent household in low-income neighborhoods, his mother encouraged him to pursue undergraduate education to ensure financial security and actualize his full potential. The schools in Dr. Braneon’s neighborhoods were under-resourced, so his mother worked to enroll him at Oak Forest Elementary School within a wealthier, predominantly White-identifying community. And while the educational opportunities piqued Dr. Braneon’s lifelong pursuit of math and science, systemic inequalities remained evident and engrained in his daily life. He was one of the few Black students in class and sometimes had to commute over two hours each way. Even so, Dr. Braneon was determined to continue his education, recognizing that this would be the foundation for a fulfilling career.
Dr. Braneon’s love of science began in 2nd grade with his first science class and continued to grow. In high school, he excelled in his physics class and realized he should choose a field that relied on math and science. This led him to pursue dual degrees in civil engineering and applied physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Morehouse College, respectively, which he completed in 2005. Attending an HBCU in the Atlanta University Center (AUC) was a transformational experience for Dr. Braneon as he developed close relationships with gifted youth from across the African diaspora.
Dr. Braneon attended the Georgia Institute of Technology, wanting to help vulnerable and marginalized communities adapt to climate change. From 2007 to 2014, Dr. Braneon was a Research Associate with the Georgia Water Resources Institute. In 2009, he was a Graduate Fellow with the National Science Foundation and a fellow with the Sam Nunn Security Program through the MacArthur Foundation. He earned his master’s and doctorate in civil engineering, specializing in water resources, hydrologic modeling, and agricultural systems. Dr. Braneon’s thesis dissertation applied global climate model outputs to irrigation demand projections. One of Dr. Braneon’s career highlights was finishing his doctorate degree, which is “essentially writing a book,” as he described it. His doctoral dissertation focused on understanding how climate change will impact the agricultural sector in the U.S.
Between 2012 and 2015, while working on his dissertation a year after graduating, Dr. Braneon was a water resources engineer for HDR, an engineering firm. He developed a methodology to help the city of Dallas prepare for drought. Dallas was the first large city in Texas to meaningfully integrate climate change projections into their water supply planning efforts, and he was proud to have contributed to this project.
From 2013 to 2015, Dr. Braneon was an Adjunct Instructor at Houston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas. He worked at the Department of Computer Science and supported a dual degree program with Prairie View A&M University.
From 2015 to 2016, Dr. Braneon was a US EPA Region IV Physical Scientist. He worked at the EPA when the agency launched its first Environmental Justice Academy (EJA) to help community leaders and organizers effectively and efficiently address environmental justice challenges in their communities. He was a Co-Director of the EJA and led regional community engagement efforts in four states about the Clean Power Plan. He was recognized for his service with a White House Climate Action Plan Award.
From 2016 to 2017, Dr. Braneon was the Assistant Director at the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Interested in doing more climate change-focused work, Dr. Braneon accepted a position as a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in 2017. Dr. Braneon helped stakeholders worldwide use satellite imagery and climate projections to characterize climate risks and adapt to climate change. Dr. Braneon became a Remote Sensing Specialist with SciSpace LLC at the NASA Goddard Space flight center. He left the organization in 2022.
In 2017, Dr. Braneon began teaching as an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University’s Barnard College in the Environmental Science department. From 2018 to 2019, Dr. Braneon was a term professor at Barnard College. He created the Environmental Justice and Climate Just Cities (EJCJC) Network at the Earth Institute with colleagues at Columbia University. He worked with South Bronx Unite to design and implement an urban heat island mapping campaign. NOAA and CAPA Strategies sponsored the project to provide sensors for community members to map temperature and humidity to understand the urban heat island effect. As a result, they demonstrated heat disparities between North Manhattan and South Bronx neighborhoods, where the latter was significantly more affected by extreme heat. Dr. Braneon always enjoys co-production with community- and environmental justice-focused organizations.
In 2017, Dr. Braneon joined the Hummingbird Firm as the Chief Engineer. In 2018, he became the Vice President of Technology & Finance and, in 2019, the Chief Technology Officer. In 2019, Dr. Braneon joined d3i Systems, inc. as a freelance Data Scientist. In 2020, Dr. Braneon began several new positions. He joined The City University of New York as a Research Affiliate for the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research. He also became the Co-Director of the Environmental Justice and Climate Just Cities Network at Columbia University Climate School’s Earth Institute. In 2019, Dr. Braneon was appointed by New York City Mayor de Blasio to New York City’s Climate Change Panel on Climate Change. In 2022, the mayor again appointed him to the Center for Climate Solutions board at the Trust for Governors Island.
Looking to extend his work applying satellite data and climate science to equitable climate action, Dr. Braneon recognized the opportunity to embed environmental and climate justice considerations in one of the fastest-growing environmental industries today: carbon removal. In 2022, Dr. Braneon joined Carbon Direct, a carbon management company founded to help enterprises drive meaningful and equitable climate action. Dr. Braneon is the Head of Climate Justice at Carbon Direct, where he leads the integration of environmental and climate justice into Carbon Direct’s culture, operations, and services for both buyers of carbon removal and carbon project developers.
Dr. Braneon is grateful to many people who mentored and advised him throughout his career. He considers several faculty and administrators at Morehouse College and Georgia Tech to be his mentors. They include Dr. Aakhut Bak, Gwen Cain, and Corby Hannah at Morehouse College, and Dr. Aris Georgakakos, Dr. Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy, S. Gordon Moore, Kim Harrington, and Etta Pittman at Georgia Tech. Dr. Braneon says, “My PhD advisor really sharpened my critical thinking skills … he helped me get a deep understanding of systems thinking and statistics as well as climate change.” He has had many formal and informal mentors over the years. Another impactful mentor he mentioned was Dr. Bill Shuster, a senior research hydrologist during Dr. Braneon’s time at the EPA. He taught Dr. Braneon how to study soils through field measurements and advised him on balancing career and family and navigating a role in the federal government. Dr. Braneon passed on this field measurement expertise to his students while teaching Environmental Data Analysis at Barnard College.
Dr. Braneon has also been a mentor to many others. He often talks with his BIPOC colleagues about “lifting as we climb.” While a principal investigator in the Climate Change Research Initiative at NASA GISS, Dr. Braneon had interns who were teachers and high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. Dr. Braneon remains in contact with his mentees, including Dr. Kathryn McConnell, who graduated with her Ph.D. from Yale University and is now pursuing postdoctoral research at Brown University. Dr. Braneon is sure to celebrate achievements alongside his mentees, saying: “I am truly joyous when I hear from someone I mentored that they graduated, they got promoted, or they’re starting a new position where they can really thrive and apply their skills to helping people and our planet” (Survey, 2023).
For a career in addressing climate change meaningfully and equitably, Dr. Braneon emphasizes the importance of understanding and applying data: “I would say, if you are interested in environmental justice, it is important to understand that it is a data-driven field. A lot of people focus on the legal and policy dimensions, but ultimately, policies are often informed by datasets consisting of geospatial data, health data, and/or socioeconomic data. Mapping and data analysis are foundational tools in environmental justice work.” Dr. Braneon advises individuals interested in environmental justice to grow their abilities to analyze and interpret data.
On climate justice specifically, Dr. Braneon states: “It is so important to spend some time seeking to understand the history of European colonization and land dispossession of Indigenous people across the globe. There is no industrial revolution without colonization and dispossession. The roots of climate crises can be traced back to European colonization and transatlantic slavery, and having that understanding is needed in order to advance climate justice today” (Survey, 2023).
Christian V. Braneon, PhD (n.d.). Home [https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-v-braneon-phd-648a1362/]. LinkedIn. Retrieved June 27, 2023, from https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-v-braneon-phd-648a1362/.
Columbia University. n.d. Christian Braneon, Co-investigator. https://heatstorynyc.org/team.html NASA Goddard. 2023.
NASA Scientist Christian Braneon Receives AXA Award for Climate Science. Retrieved June 27, 2023 from https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-scientist-christian-braneon-receives-a….
Survey and interviews conducted by Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Sustainability Initiative staff. 2022-2023. Yale University-School of the Environment. New Haven, Connecticut.
The Official Website of the City of New York. 2019. Mayor de Blasio Appoints Leadership Team for the Fourth New York City Panel on Climate Change. https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/635-19/mayor-de-blasio-appo…