Bob Kopp

Climate and sea-level scientist and climate policy scholar at Rutgers University’s Dept. of Earth & Planetary Sciences and Rutgers Climate & Energy Institute.

I am a climate and sea-level scientist and a climate policy scholar. I serve at Rutgers University as a distinguished professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences. I lead Rutgers’ Earth System Science and Policy Lab; please see the Lab website if you are interested in our work or in joining our team.

I direct the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH), an NSF-funded consortium led by Rutgers. MACH works within the Philadelphia-New York City-New Jersey region to both 1) facilitate flexible, equitable, and robust multidecadal planning to manage climate risk, and 2) advance the scientific understanding of how interactions among coastal climate hazards, changing landforms, and human decisions shape climate risk.

I’m one of the directors of the Climate Impact Lab, a collaboration of more than three dozen climate scientists, economists, data scientists and policy scholars, working to bring Big Data approaches to the assessment of the economic risks of climate change.

My research focuses on understanding uncertainty in past and future climate change, with major emphases on sea-level change, the interactions between physical climate change and the economy, and the use of climate risk information to inform decisionmaking.

I am a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2021 Sixth Assessment Report, the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s 2017 Fourth National Climate Assessment and Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus. I have also served on sea-level rise expert groups for several states and cities.

From 2021-2023, I served as Founding Co-Director of the Rutgers Office of Climate Action. From 2017-2021, I served as director of the Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS). In addition to the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and EOAS, I am also a member of the Rutgers Climate Institute and the Rutgers Energy Institute. I am affiliated with Rutgers graduate programs in Atmospheric Sciences, Geological Sciences, Oceanography, Statistics, and Planning and Public Policy.

Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, I served as a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Policy and International Affairs and as a Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. I received my Ph.D. in geobiology from Caltech and my undergraduate degree in geophysical sciences from the University of Chicago.

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