Brent Sohngen

Professor, The Ohio State University Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics

Areas of Expertise:

  • Natural Resource & Environmental Economics - Valuing environmental change
  • Modeling land-use/land-cover change
  • Timber market modeling
  • Economics of non-point source pollution

Brent Sohngen is a professor of environmental and resource economics in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at The Ohio State University. He also leads Ohio State’s Environmental Policy Initiative. Dr. Sohngen received his doctorate in environmental and resource economics from Yale University in 1996. He conducts research on the economics of land use change, the design of incentive mechanisms for water and carbon trading, carbon sequestration, and valuation of environmental resources. Dr. Sohngen developed a global forest and land use model that has been widely used to assess the implications of climate change on ecosystems and markets, and to assess the costs of carbon sequestration in forests, including reductions in deforestation. Dr. Sohngen has written or co-written 31 peer-reviewed journal articles, 45 monographs and book chapters. He co-authored sections of the 2001 and 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, and he co-authored the forestry chapter of the most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment Report. Additionally, he has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit, Energy and Research.  He teaches courses on “Food, Population and the Environment” and “Energy, the Environment, and the Economy”.

Recent Publications

Sedjo, Roger A., and Brent Sohngen. "The Effects of a Federal Tax Reform on the US Timber Sector." (2015).

Sedjo, Roger A., Brent Sohngen, and Anne Riddle. "Land Use Change, Carbon, And Bioenergy Reconsidered." Climate Change Economics 6.01 (2015): 1550002.

Kim, Sei Jin, et al. "THE IMPLICATIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ON NUTRIENT OUTPUTS IN AGRICULTURAL WATERSHEDS."