back to all faculty
Benjamin Goldstein
Assistant Professor
Sustainable Systems
Climate + Energy
Food Systems
Cities + Mobility + Built Environment
Office
3532 Dana
Lab website
Websites
About
Benjamin Goldstein is Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), affiliated with the Center for Sustainable Systems, and head of the Sustainable Urban-Rural Futures Lab (www.surf-lab.earth) and a core member of the Center for Sustainable Systems at SEAS. Goldstein's research develops advanced urban sustainability analytics to map, measure, and mitigate the environmental impacts of cities, with a distinctive emphasis on urban-rural interconnections rather than city-centric analysis alone.
His work sits at the intersection of industrial ecology and urban sustainability science. Goldstein studies how urban processes and urban form drive the consumption of materials and energy in cities and produce environmental change both inside and outside city boundaries, including in the distant farms, fisheries, forests, mines, and factories that supply them. He develops methods and tools to quantify the scale of these impacts and identify where they occur, using life cycle assessment (LCA), environmentally-extended input-output analysis, geospatial data, and data science approaches. This combination of data and methods allows him to treat cities and their supply chains as systems whose material, energy, and carbon footprints can be measured and mapped.
He is particularly interested in combining these quantitative methods with theory rooted in the social sciences to explore multiple dimensions of sustainability and address issues of environmental and distributive justice; how the environmental burdens and benefits of urban and supply-chain systems are unevenly distributed across communities.
Topical foci include:
- Urban food systems, especially urban agriculture and controlled-environment agriculture
- Agri-commodity supply chains (e.g., beef, palm oil, avocados, rubber, cannabis), deforestation, and corporate supply-chain tracking
- Residual resource engineering and circular economy strategies
- Global supply chains and sustainable production and consumption
- Energy systems, including racial and socioeconomic inequities in energy access
- Urban metabolism and municipal resource and energy efficiency
Prospective master's and PhD students interested in urban sustainability, industrial ecology, life cycle assessment, input-output analysis, or geospatial methods for quantifying the environmental footprint of cities can find current lab openings and application guidance at surf-lab.earth/join, or reach out directly with a one-page research statement and CV.
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.)
In the News
In the Media