Biography.

Jesse M. Keenan is the Favrot II Associate Professor of Sustainable Real Estate and Urban Planning, Director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism, and Director of the Climate Change Science and Practice Minor Program at Tulane University. Keenan’s research focuses on the intersection of climate change mitigation and adaptation in the built environment, including aspects of design, engineering, regulation, planning and financing. Keenan has previously advised on matters concerning the built environment for agencies of the U.S. government, governors, mayors, Fortune 500 companies, technology ventures, community enterprises and international NGOs. Keenan formerly served as the Director and Area Head for Real Estate and Built Environment on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design; Fellow of Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government; and as the Research Director of the Center for Urban Real Estate on the faculty of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, as well as visiting appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University.

Keenan is the author of the book, North: The Future of Post-Climate America (Oxford University Press, 2025), co-author of NYC 2040: Housing the Next One Million New Yorkers (Columbia University Press, 2014), and the author of Climate Adaptation Finance and Investment in California (Routledge, 2018), which is free in the public domain thanks to a generous grant from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Keenan is the co-editor of the books, Blue Dunes: Climate Change by Design (2nd Edition)(Columbia University Press, 2017) and North American Climate Adaptation: Fostering Resilience and a Regional Capacity to Adapt (Springer, 2017), which was published in both English and German. With colleagues from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Keenan is the co-editor of the book, COVID-19: Systemic Risk and Resilience (Springer, 2021), which documents the contributions of the editors and their colleagues to support the national pandemic response. Keenan is also the co-author of a variety of design research monographs, including, Mobility Oriented Design: The Case for Miami’s Metrorail (Office of Urbanization, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2019); Adapting Miami (Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2020), and Multiple Miamis (Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2020).

Keenan’s research has been published in Science, Nature Sustainability, Nature Communications, Environmental Science and Policy, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Environmental Research Letters, Climatic Change, Earth Systems Governance, Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management, Sustainability, Ocean & Coastal Management, Natural Hazards Review, International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, Journal of Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, Journal of Infrastructure Systems, Journal of the American Planning Association, and Cities, among other journals, as well as popular essays in Reuters, Scientific American, CNN, Newsweek, Dezeen, Metropolis Magazine, and MoMA.org. Keenan has an Erdős number of 4 and currently serves as the Deputy Editor for Geography at journal Climatic Change (Springer Nature).

Keenan been cited as an authority by national and international media, including on-air on ABC News, Bloomberg TV, CBS News, CCTV (China), CNBC, CNN, The Daily Show, Discovery Channel, DW-TV (Germany), Financial Times (U.K.), France 2 (France), KBS (Korea), NBC News, MSNBC, PBS, Reuters TV, The Weather Channel, TVO (Canada), Fox Weather, and Univision. Keenan’s research has been widely covered in the global media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, Rolling Stone, Bloomberg News, Popular Science, BBC, Reuters, Associated Press, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Financial Times, NPR, The Weather Channel, and the Washington Post, among many other media outlets.

Keenan previously served as a Senior Economist at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers where he supported climate change adaptation, risk mitigation, and national security research, planning, and policy across the U.S. government. In this capacity he supported the development of the U.S. National Resilience Strategy and the U.S. National Adaptation Plan during the Biden Administration. He formerly served as the Chair and Vice-Chair for the U.S. Community Resilience Panel for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems, a federal interagency initiative formerly under the Obama White House Climate Action Plan. Keenan formerly represented the United States on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and was appointed to the 4th, 5th, and 6th U.S. National Climate Assessments by the U.S. Global Change Research Program within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Keenan is also active in advancing climate change education and workforce development, including as a former member of the White House Forum on Campus and Community-Scale Climate Change Solutions.

From 2018-2020, Keenan served as a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (FRBSF) where he led the bank’s first major research initiative in climate adaptation and community development. This research culminated in the edited volume, Strategies to Address Climate Change Risk in Low- and Moderate-Income Communities (FRBSF, 2019), which The New York Times described “one of the most specific and dire accountings of the dangers posed to businesses and communities in the United States —a threat so significant that the nation’s central bank seems increasingly compelled to address it”(October 17, 2019). Keenan’s research on the Community Reinvestment Act produced at the FRBSF directly led to the only climate-related financial regulation to make it through rule-making in the United States. From 2019-2021, Keenan served as a Special Government Employee Advisor to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) where he co-led research efforts evaluating the impacts of climate change on financial stability. In this capacity, he served as an elected co-editor of the landmark publication, Managing Climate Risk in the U.S. Financial System (CFTC, 2020), which, according to The Wall Street Journal, “[was] the first of its kind from a federal financial regulator”(September 9, 2020).

Keenan formerly served as a Research Advisor for Climate Adaptation for Governor Jerry Brown’s Office of Planning and Research for the State of California and as a Research Advisor to Governor Charlie Baker's Executive Office for Energy and the Environment for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Keenan previously served as an appointed member of Mayor Bloomberg’s NYC Task Force for Building Resiliency and on the Climate Change Working Group for the 4th Regional Plan for NYC.

Keenan has completed regional economic planning research in Brazil in collaboration with UN-Habitat; housing research in NYC for the Carnegie Corporation of New York; urban technology research sponsored by Google, CISCO and Airbnb; zoning research with the NYC Department of City Planning; public resilience planning research for the Rockefeller Foundation; real estate research with Goldman Sachs; adaptive building design research in Tokyo for Hulic Co., Ltd.; international housing finance research sponsored by the Open Society Foundation; resilience research with the National Security Council; mobility and real estate research for the Lennar Foundation; urban development research in Miami supported by the Knight Foundation; climate planning research for the Regional Plan Association; urban systems research in NYC for the Audi Urban Future Initiative; infrastructure resilience with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; resilience, infrastructure and demography research for the RAND Corporation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; socioeconomic indicator development for climate adaptation with the EPA, supported by the National Science Foundation; and, has testified in the U.S. Congress on matters relating to climate change, infrastructure and public finance.

Keenan was among the first scholars to study the relationship between climate change and real estate and was among the first to publish peer reviewed evidence of the existence of a climate change signal in a real estate market and in a mortgage market. Keenan’s theory of “Climate Gentrification” has gone on to shape a global discourse on the relationship between climate change, social equity and applied economics. Keenan also developed the concepts of “Bluelining” and the “Climate Intelligence Arms Race,” which have framed active domestic and international policy conversations concerning the role and distributional impact of market-based adaptation.

Keenan is the Executive Producer of the globally recognized climate change podcast America Adapts, which was nominated for Best “Green” Podcast at the 2021 iHeart Radio Podcast Awards and was a 2022 Webby Awards Honoree for Sustainability and Environment Podcasts. Keenan formerly served as Chair of the Keeping Currents climate change initiative of the Van Alen Institute, which resulted in the design, development and construction of experimental prototypes for landscape flood protection in South Florida. Keenan ahs served on various committees and boards at the Mori Foundation, The Municipal Art Society, Stanford University, the University of Florida, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Keenan is one of the founding researchers of Kohn Pedersen Fox’s Urban Interface Laboratory and he began his research career working for the late Professor Charles Haar of Harvard Law School.

Keenan’s work bridging the art and science of the built environment includes contributions to exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), including Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream (Community Growth REIT (2012)) and Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanism and Expanded Megacities (Community Growth Corporation (2014)). Keenan has the distinction of being the first person to exhibit an excel spreadsheet at MoMA.

Keenan is a Certified Planner with the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), a Fellow of the Forum + Institute for Urban Design, and was previously a Pension Real Estate Association (PREA) Scholar and a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Keenan holds degrees in the law (J.D., LL.M.) and science (M.Sc.) of real estate and the built environment, including a Ph.D. from the Delft University of Technology.

For speaking engagements, please contact the Leigh Bureau:

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In Asia: Cecilia Lee (zy@leighbureau.com)

Homepage Photo Credit:

Tim Gruber for The New York Times (2019)