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Benjamin Goldstein
Assistant Professor
Sustainable Systems
Climate + Energy
Food Systems
Cities + Mobility + Built Environment
Office
3532 Dana
Lab website
Websites
About
Benjamin Goldstein studies how urban processes and urban form drive the consumption of materials and energy in cities (the urban metabolism), producing environmental change both inside and outside city boundaries. He combines life cycle assessment (LCA), geospatial data, and urban informatics to advance methods for urban environmental footprinting. Applying these methods across diverse systems (food, buildings, transportation) he quantifies the scale of environmental impacts from cities and their supply chains and pinpoints where they occur. He is interested in combining methods from industrial ecology with theory from social science (esp. geography) to explore multiple dimensions of sustainability and clarify how the impacts of cities are distributed unevenly across landscapes and communities.
Publications
Goldstein, B. P., Pelton, R. E., Gounaridis, D., Schmitt, J., Springer, N., & Newell, J. P. (2025). The carbon hoofprint of cities is shaped by geography and production in the livestock supply chain. Nature Climate Change, 15(11), 1190-1197.
Goldstein, B. P., Levy, D., Hawes, J. K., & Finn, B. M. (2026). A typology of resource circularity in cities. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 227, 108743.
Chamanara, S., Gounaridis, D., Goldstein, B., & Newell, J. P. (2025). Geography of animal feeding operations and their contribution to fine particulate matter pollution in vulnerable communities in the United States. Communications Earth & Environment, 6(1), 620.
Hawes, J. K., Goldstein, B. P., Newell, J. P., Dorr, E., Caputo, S., Fox-Kämper, R., ... & Cohen, N. (2024). Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture. Nature Cities, 1(2), 164-173.
VanderWilde, C.P., Newell, J.P., Gounaridis, D. and Goldstein, B.P., 2023. Deforestation, certification, and transnational palm oil supply chains: Linking Guatemala to global consumer markets. Journal of Environmental Management, 344, p.118505.
Goldstein, B., Reames, T.G. and Newell, J.P., 2022. Racial inequity in household energy efficiency and carbon emissions in the United States: An emissions paradox. Energy Research & Social Science, 84, p.102365.
Goldstein, B., Gounaridis, D. and Newell, J.P., 2020. The carbon footprint of household energy use in the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(32), pp.19122-19130.
Goldstein, B. and Newell, J.P., 2020. How to track corporations across space and time. Ecological Economics, 169, p.106492.
Goldstein, B.P., Hauschild, M.Z., Fernández, J.E. and Birkved, M., 2017. Contributions of local farming to urban sustainability in the Northeast United States. Environmental science & technology, 51(13), pp.7340-7349.
Research
Benjamin is interested in how we can make cities greener. He uses big data and models to put numbers on the environmental impacts of urban lifestyles. For example, he might look at meat consumption in different neighborhoods of a city to estimate the amount of climate changing gasses, such as methane from cows, result from the city’s meat consumption. Benjamin is also interested in revealing how consumption in cities can produce negative environmental change beyond the city borders and impact the livelihoods of distant peoples. His work focuses on agricultural systems and forestry products.
By better understanding where our products come from and how they are made, we gain insights into how to produce and consume more sustainably.
Ongoing Projects:
The FEW- Meter: Project with EU and US partners to holistically assess the sustainability of urban farming. We analyze 100 urban farms to understand their resource use, food outputs, environmental impacts, and social benefits. Funding: Belmont Forum/NSF.
Carbon Inequality of Household Energy: Project with University of Michigan. Big data analysis of the carbon emissions from residential energy use in the United States. Probabilistic models of energy use at the individual household level, combined with geodemographic information to reveal drivers of consumption and emissions.
The Sustainability Hoofprint of Cities: Project with University of Michigan and University of Minnesota. Develops spatial life cycle assessment model of livestock production across the continental United States at the county level. Estimates consumption of beef, chicken, and pork for all counties and uses linear optimization to connect consuming counties to producing counties and explore distributional environmental justice issues.
Education
PhD, Technical University of Denmark (Management Engineering)
MSc, Technical University of Denmark (Environmental Engineering)
BASc, University of Toronto (Chemical Engineering)
Affiliations
Professional Engineers of Ontario (P.Eng.)
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