Brian C. O'Neill (born 1965) is an American earth system scientist who studies the relationship between future societal development, emissions, and climate change impacts.
[1] After working on the science staff of the Environmental Defense Fund in New York, he was an Assistant and Associate Professor (Research) at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.
From 2005 to 2009 O'Neill was at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, where he founded and led the Population and Climate Change Program.
In October 2020, O'Neill was appointed as director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute of the University of Maryland, College Park and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
[8][9][10] These SSPs replace the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) projections and will be used to systematically assess climate change under different societal futures.