Charlotte Wagner

Charlotte Wagner is a Senior Scientist at SEI US. Her research focuses on greenhouse gas mitigation, the water-energy-food nexus, land use, and the impacts of air and water pollution on human health and ecosystems. Charlotte has over 10 years of expertise in assessing the magnitude and impacts of human-made pollution, including greenhouse gas and chemical pollution. She is particularly interested in linkages between climate change, environmental pollution, and public health, and seeks to create useful models and quantitative analyses that support rigorous environmental and public health policymaking.

Charlotte leads environmental and energy modeling, policy analysis, and capacity building activities within SEI’s Energy Modeling Program. She contributes to the technical development of SEI’s modeling tools, including the Low Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP), the Next Energy Modeling system for Optimization (NEMO), the Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) system, and the SEI AFOLU Tool for greenhouse gas accounting and mitigation planning in agriculture, forestry, and land use sectors. Her work includes integrated climate and development planning in Central Asia and Morocco, and recent work on energy insecurity and equitable energy transitions in New York State.

Her recent work increasingly focuses on marine and coastal sustainability, including ocean pollution, small scale fisheries, offshore wind development, and marine planning. Within the Mistra-funded Co-Creating Better Blue (C2B2) initiative, she contributes to AI-assisted literature synthesis and evidence integration approaches to support dialogue and decision-making around ecosystem impacts of offshore wind development, and to scenario analysis investigating opportunities and trade-offs associated with multifunctional offshore wind use.

Charlotte joined SEI in 2021 after graduating from Harvard University with a PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering. During her doctorate, Charlotte studied the impacts of climate change and regulation on pollutants in the environment, with a special focus on ocean pollution. She developed large-scale emission inventories and global biogeochemical simulations for persistent organic pollutants using climate models, statistics, and GIS. She also worked with NASA DEVELOP on a heat vulnerability index for the City of Philadelphia and was a delegate on Harvard University’s Climate Task Force. Prior to her PhD, Charlotte worked as a scientific editor on the health risks of chemicals used in food packaging at the Zurich-based NGO Food Packaging Forum.