Draft:Christian Brand (scientist)

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Christian Brand is Professor of Transport, Energy and Climate Change at the University of Oxford's Transport Studies Unit and Environmental Change Institute, and Co-Director of the UK Energy Research Centre. He is an internationally recognised environmental scientist, physicist and geographer with 30 years experience in research, teaching and impact. He has developed an international reputation for policy-relevant expertise in transport and energy systems and climate change mitigation, evidenced through sustained engagement with international bodies including the World Health Organization, World Bank Group, and the UN Economic Commission for Europe.

He received his DPhil in Geography and the Environment from the University of Oxford in 2006.

Advanced study and research

Prof Brand's contributions to scholarship in transport, energy and climate change are diverse, but at the core lies a focus on bringing environmental, technological and social perspectives on transport and energy systems together and on offering an applied science perspective on transport and energy systems and their relationships with climate change, socio-technological innovation, public health, inequity and wider social change. There are four, partly overlapping categories to his contributions:

1. Transport and climate inequality: the relationships of travel behaviour with inequality and social distribution of greenhouse gas emissions from personal transport;
2. Active mobility: understanding walking, cycling and micromobility behaviour and its impact on climate change and public health;
3. Transport and energy: understanding, measuring and evaluating the impacts of transport and energy use on climate change, local air pollution and public health;
4. Transport and energy demand futures: co-creating future pathways and policy strategies that are informed by transport-energy-environment systems modelling at national, city and local scales.

Work on transport and climate inequality has been motivated by methodological and policy questions such as ‘How can we measure social distribution of climate emissions from household and individual travel behaviour across modes, time and space?’, ‘Who drives, flies and cycles most/least?’ and ‘Who emits most/least greenhouse gas emissions from personal transport?’. On this theme, he has published one research monograph (Personal Travel and Climate Change, 2008..) and 8 lead- or co-authored articles with over 100 citations (see , building on ). His work seeks to understand and measure personal travel behaviours for all purposes (e.g. daily commute, business, holidays), modes of transport (e.g. car, international air travel) and social groups (e.g. socio-economic status) to paint a multi-faceted picture of transport carbon footprints. The seminal work on examining integrated travel emissions ‘profiles’ of individuals, households, local communities and cities provides critical empirical evidence of a highly unequal distribution of carbon emissions at different units of analysis and geographical scales, whether household, neighbourhood or city (e.g. ). We now know that a small share of people is responsible for the majority of personal transport emissions, particularly for car use and international air travel. The method of measuring and assessing individual carbon profiles in the absence of direct air pollution measurements has been replicated and improved by many subsequent studies.

The second research focus has been on ‘active travel’ – walking, cycling, wheeling and other physically active forms of ‘micromobility’. Prof Brand's papers, blogs and reports on the links between active travel and transport-related carbon emissions, energy use and public health from increased physical activity have helped to set the international research agenda on the topic . He led the scientific development and implementation of the carbon effects module of the WHO Health Economic Assessment Tool (WHO HEAT) for walking and cycling . WHO HEAT is an online tool for urban and transport planners that provides location-specific health and climate change impact and cost estimates for grant and investment bidding purposes for public authorities, government agencies and the third sector. WHO HEAT has become the ‘gold standard’ methodology and tool for health and climate impact assessment of active travel across the world. To date, WHO HEAT has been used in over 30 countries and cities in Europe, North America, Australia, South America and Sub Saharan Africa. His work on the climate change impacts of active mobility was influential in adding 'active travel' as low carbon options in the final Transport Declaration of UN COP26.

Research on understanding and modelling transport, energy and environment systems started with influential collaborative work to model the complex relationships between travel demand and supply across all modes of transport and the impacts on energy use and emissions . This filled a gap in research and practice of modelling the systems at the national level, which has become increasingly important since the introduction of national climate, air pollution and, more recently, traffic reduction targets. Over the past 25 years Prof Brand led on the development, implementation and application of a novel Transport-Energy-Environment (TEE) systems modelling framework that has become a ‘reference tool’ for strategic, integrated scenario modelling in the UK and internationally . The UK Transport Carbon Model () has been applied in policy and ‘what if’ scenario studies, including on 'Dieselgate' , the role of purchasing incentives in accelerating the transport decarbonisation , and modelling the effects of lifestyle and social change in personal transport . This work has been cited or used in government studies in the UK, Netherlands, Republic of Ireland and Republic of South Korea. The model has been adapted by others to various contexts, including for Barbados. The modelling framework subsequently branched out to, firstly, fuel and vehicle lifecycle emissions (e.g. ), and later included a wider range of air pollutants and impacts in the Transport Energy and Air pollution Model (TEAM), that features a detailed representation of travel demand as well as a heterogenous vehicle market and consumer choice model

This work has advanced our understanding of the extent to which countries and cities across the world are transitioning towards low-energy, low-carbon transport systems and of the prospects of further diffusion and improvement of electric vehicles (EV), shifting to shared and active mobility (car sharing, ride hailing, bike sharing, e-biking) and the avoidance of travel demand. In recognition of this work he was invitated by Greta Thunberg to co-write a chapter on this topic for The Climate Book alongside preeminent climate scholars.

Research on transport and energy demand futures has used a mixed method approach of co-creating qualitative scenario narratives that were then modelled quantitatively to assess the impacts of lifestyle and social change on transport energy demand , and the need to phase out fossil fuel vehicles by 2030 in order to meet our decarbonisation targets . Several synthesis papers have emerged from CREDS and UKERC, including an influential policy impact paper published in 2022 in Nature Energy . Its main contribution lies in developing and applying a bottom-up, whole-system framework of the economy that demonstrates the important role reductions in energy demand play in decarbonising an economy without compromising on citizens’ quality of life. Further work on modelling ‘Net Zero Societies’ commissioned by the Foresight team of the UK Government Office for Science (GO-Science) was published in mid 2023

Publications

Prof Brand has published widely in peer-reviewed journals including top journals Nature Energy, Global Environmental Change, Transportation Research A and Environment International. Determined to have impact beyond academia, he has (co-)authored 15 Research Reports since 2017 alone, including six of the annual UKERC Review of Energy Policy series that are influential in policy and industry circles, the high-impact report for NGO Global Action Plan on The health costs of air pollution from cars and vans, the highly influential CREDS report on The role of energy demand reduction in achieving net-zero in the UK, and the globally used WHO HEAT for walking and cycling.

His publications are widely read and well-cited. According to Google Scholar, his h-index is 40 and the total number of citations exceeds 5,400.