Steven J. Davis

Steve Davis is a professor in the Department of Earth System Science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He leads the Stanford Sustainable Solutions Lab, a research group dedicated to quantifying how different human activities are affecting climate and air quality, how those environmental changes in turn jeopardize human wellbeing, and the relative priority of solutions.

He and his group have published seminal papers assessing carbon emissions, air pollution and water resources embodied in international trade, committed emissions related to existing energy infrastructure, the economic and biophysical limits of various carbon dioxide removal approaches, interactions among food-energy-water systems, global and regional drivers of agriculture land-use change emissions, and the opportunities and challenges for net-zero emissions energy and food systems.

Steve is a highly-cited researcher who worked as a lawyer to venture-backed companies in Silicon Valley prior to his science career. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Science from Stanford University, a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law, and a BA from the University of Florida where he double-majored in Political Science and Philosophy.

Steve was a Contributing Author of two Working Group III chapters in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), serves on the Scientific Steering Committee of the Global Carbon Project, was the Lead Author of the Mitigation chapter in the recent U.S. Fifth National Climate Assessment, and is a member of the Technical Council of the Science Based Targets Initiative. He was also the first Head of Climate Science for the Watershed enterprise sustainability platform, and currently serves as the Chair of the company’s Science Advisory Board.