Background and activities

Dr. Moran is a Forsker I (equivalent to a teunured Research Professor in the US system) using applied data science in the field of environmental economics. He is an active contributor to the development and application of input-output models to track resource flows embodied in supply chains. Before starting his academic career Daniel worked on Wall Street pricing ESG risk at MSCI and assisted the Nobel laureate Paul Romer developing an economics hybrid class. Daniel began his career building the original Ecological Footprint accounts and working at several dot-com startups in his native California.

My work using data science to develop high-resolution environmental footprints has been featured in National Geographic, the New York Times, and The Economist. I have presented my work to the US National Academies of Science. My work is highly computational and I make use of HPC facilities to bring empircal data to inform sustainability questions.

According to Google, my academic papers have been cited 11,000+ times and my H-Index is 44. I have been named as one of the world's top 1% most cited researchers for the past three years. 

Projects:

OpenGHGMap - CO2 Emissions data for 108,000 European Cities
citycarbonfootprints.info - Carbon Footprints for 13,000 Global Cities
worldmrio.com - Database documenting 5 billion global supply chains

Awards

Clarivate/Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher in 2021
Clarivate/Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher in 2020
Clarivate/Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher in 2019
(awarded for producing multiple papers in the top 1% of most-cited papers)

Top 1% cited researcher 2020 - Stanford/Elsevier/Scopus

Qualifications

2013 - PhD, School of Physics, The University of Sydney
2007 - MS, Environmental Studies and Sustainability, Lund University
2001 - BA, Philosophy, Whitman College

Grants

The Economics of Planetary Boundaries (Partner; €1,925,000 FORMAS. 2020)
Young Research Talent Grant: The Environmental Footprint of Cities, a New Approach (PI, $900,000, NFR. 2019)
Value-at-risk to global supply chains from disruption to ecosystem services (PI, $50,000, United Nations Environment Programme. 2018)
FOOTPRINTS2.0: Linking Spatial GIS Data to MRIO Global Economic Models (wrote proposal; lead researcher, €650,000, NFR. 2016)
University of Sydney Faculty of Science Scholarship for Postgraduate Research. 2010-2013. €97,000.

Press

I prioritize doing work that is robust, useful, and topical. I strive to clearly communicate and visualize science. Uptake of my work includles:

  • The study I led on mapping biodiversity footprints of products, printed in Nature Ecology & Evolution, was widely covered in the press, including by National Geographic, Scientific American, TIME, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
  • Our paper on the scope of individual action to reduce the EU's global carbon footprint was discussed in a special report by The Economist about what individuals and companies can do to reduce their Scope 3 emissions.
  • OpenGHGMap.net, which maps CO2 emissions for 108,000 EU cities, has received >300,000 views. In 2022 I presented this work at the US National Academies of Science.
  • The Eora global supply chain database which I helped develop and continue to maintain, documents >5 billion global supply chains and their embodied carbon and resource footprints. That model has supported over 1,000 scientific papers, underpinned research results appearing in Nature and PNAS, and is is used by the UN, IMF, World Bank, and a number of large firms (names withheld).
  • Our study on Scope 3 carbon footprint of 13,000 cities globally (citycarbonfootprints.info) was covered by Scientific American, National Geographic, Newsweek, the World Economic Forum, and Forbes, among others.
  • Our seminal study on calculating biodiversity footprints published in Nature was widely covered in the press, including by Scientific American, BBC, Reuters, Le Monde, and many national magazines and newspapers (see #11 below). My colleague Edgar Hertwich wrote a nice commentary  about the paper.

Publications

All of my publications are available at my website: folk.ntnu.no/daniemor

Keywords

data science; industrial ecology; environmental economics; carbon footprinting; biodiversity footprints; embodied water; scope 3; consumption-based accounting; LCA; input-ouput; material flow analysis; high performance computing

 

 

Scientific, academic and artistic work

A selection of recent journal publications, artistic productions, books, including book and report excerpts. See all publications in the database

Journal publications