Benjamin Preston is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and director of Community Health and Environmental Policy, a program of RAND Social and Economic Well-Being. He is also a professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School. His recent research efforts include understanding the development of knowledge systems for climate risk management, scenario analysis for a low-carbon future, and planning for disaster recovery and resilience. Previously, he held research positions with the Climate Change Science Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the CSIRO's Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research, and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
In 2015, he received the American Geophysical Union’s Falkenberg Award, and from 2016 to 2017 he was one of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s inaugural Lesher Leadership Fellows. Preston has contributed to national and international scientific assessments including the U.S. National Climate Assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports, the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s second State of the Carbon Cycle Report, and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program’s Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic. He currently serves as co-editor-in-chief for the Elsevier journal Climate Risk Management and was recently appointed to the Climate Adaptation Task Team for the Global Climate Observing System.
Preston received a B.S. in biology from the College of William & Mary and a Ph.D. in environmental biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Selected Publications
E.C.H. Keskitalo and B.L. Preston, Research Handbook on Climate Change Adaptation Policy, Edward Elgar Publishing (EP-), 2019
KM Ernst, ÅG Swartling, K André, BL Preston, RJT Klein, "Identifying climate service production constraints to adaptation decision-making in Sweden," Environmental Science & Policy, 93, 2019
Nichols, L., Vallario, R., Clarke, L, Hejazi, M., Horing, J., Janetos, A.C., Mach, K., Mastrandrea, M., Orr, M., Preston, B.L., Reed, P., Sands, R.N., and White, D. "Chapter 17: Sector Interactions, Multiple Stressors, and Complex Systems," in , Fourth National Climate Assessment. Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States, U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2018
NA Cradock-Henry, B Frame, BL Preston, A Reisinger, DS Rothman, "Dynamic adaptive pathways in downscaled climate change scenarios," Climatic Change, 150(3-4), 2018
SM Absar, AM Boulay, MF Campa, BL Preston, A Taylor, "The tradeoff between water and carbon footprints of Barnett Shale gas," Journal of Cleaner Production, 197, 2018
S Gangrade, SC Kao, BS Naz, D Rastogi, M Ashfaq, N Singh, BL Preston, "Sensitivity of probable maximum flood in a changing environment," Water Resources Research, 54(6), 2018
KM Ernst, BL Preston, "Adaptation opportunities and constraints in coupled systems: Evidence from the US energy-water nexus," Environmental Science & Policy, 70, 2017
Malone, E. L., M. Betsill, S. Hughes, R. Kemp, L. Lutzenhiser, M. Moezzi, B. L. Preston, and T. O. West "Chapter 6: Social science perspectives on carbon," in , State of the Carbon Cycle Report II, U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2018
