The people who build the model and answer the comments.

Principals and technical staff

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  David Roland-Holst, PhD

  Founder and Executive Director, Principal-in-Charge

  Faculties of Economics and Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley. Founded BEAR in 2002, built the BEAR model, and is principal investigator on every SRIA in the firm’s record.

  Six books, including Environmental and Resource Economics: Theory and Practice (World Scientific, 2025), Carbon Pricing: A Guide for Policy Makers (World Bank, 2022) and California Climate Change: Risk and Response (UC Press, 2012). More than one hundred peer-reviewed articles, cited in IPCC Working Group III reports.

  Previously Senior Economist and Head of Program at the OECD Development Centre, faculty at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Senior International Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission. Consultant to the World Bank, IMF, OECD and ADB, with more than 30 ADB contracts, 12 as team leader, and research in more than forty countries. Member of SCAG’s Economic Roundtable.

  Dynamic CGE, carbon pricing, trade and growth modeling, UC Berkeley profile, Publications (RePEc)

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  Drew Behnke, PhD

  Senior Economist, Fiscal and economic modeling

  Environmental economics, applied econometrics and geospatial analysis. PhD, UC Santa Barbara; BA, UC Berkeley. Leads BEAR’s data and econometric work, including compliance-cost modeling for the California Privacy Protection Agency SRIA (2024) and municipal revenue models. Co-author of the Energy Commission’s 2018 long-term scenarios report.

  Econometrics, GIS and remote sensing, climate impact estimation

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  Sam Heft-Neal, PhD

  Senior Economist, Demographic and spatial analysis

  Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, and with BEAR since 2007. PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Berkeley. About forty journal articles, including papers in Nature, The Lancet, Lancet Global Health, Nature Medicine and PNAS, and a study of preterm births drawn from about three million California birth records.

  Co-author of the California ISO SB 350 economic study and the Energy Commission’s 2018 census-tract job forecasts; leads BEAR’s econometric attribution and demographic work.

  Statistics, econometrics, spatial analysis, Stanford page

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  Jonathan Chang, MDP

  Modeling and data visualization lead

  Builds the data systems, interactive tools and figures behind BEAR’s reports, and co-authored the California Privacy Protection Agency SRIA (2024). Years of field work in Central and Southeast Asia with the Asian Development Bank, the Aga Khan Foundation and the Center for Effective Global Action.

  MDP, UC Berkeley; undergraduate degree, Yale University.

  Data visualization, digital delivery, field data systems

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  Diana Gee

  Project Manager

  BEAR’s project manager since 2017, after a career at the University of California Office of the President that included nine years as Executive Assistant to the President. She administered the firm’s City of Los Angeles and Culver City engagements and runs scheduling, client invoicing and quality control on deliverables.