Benjamin DeAngelo

Benjamin DeAngelo is an experienced leader bridging climate science with emissions mitigation and adaptation actions domestically and internationally. He departed the federal government in 2025 after serving for over 27 years, including as EPA’s inaugural Director of the Office of Climate Adaptation and Sustainability. He also served as the deputy director for NOAA’s Climate Program Office and as senior climate advisor for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Obama Administration. He has since founded Operation Future, LLC, focused on climate adaptation and resilience, and is an Adjunct Professor at Howard University in Washington, DC. DeAngelo previously served a two-year term as chair of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, a working group under the Arctic Council. He’s recently written about promising options to use quantitative metrics of climate resilience by governments and project developers, and a critique of the current EPA’s repeal of the greenhouse gas endangerment finding. DeAngelo received his bachelor’s in geography at Pennsylvania State University, master’s in geography at the University of Toronto, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany. In 2022, he was named by Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences as one of its 125th Anniversary Fellows.

My proposal is to conduct research and interviews to produce a report to clarify and recommend a set of actions for EPA’s mission and mandate for climate adaptation. I propose to focus this work on EPA’s core mission areas of air quality, water quality, contaminant cleanup, and chemical regulation. Extreme heat will be an additional focal area given the importance of that climate risk factor. The first element will be to summarize the state of science on the extent to which our rapidly changing climate is impacting U.S. air quality, water quality, contaminant cleanup, and chemical behavior. The second element is to assess the opportunities and limitations for EPA to take climate adaptive measures in light of existing statutory authorities. The third element is to identify the most important things that EPA should do to protect public health and the environment from the risks of climate change. This will entail relationships with States, grant programs, rulemakings, tool development, and research. The fourth element will be a set of technical, policy, funding, personnel and legislative recommendations for EPA, States, and Congress to empower EPA to have a clear and targeted role for climate adaptation.