Rate My Professor Holly Buck

Holly Buck is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo, College of Arts and Sciences. She earned a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University in 2017 and an MSc in Human Ecology from Lund University in 2011. As an environmental social scientist, her research examines the social, political, and governance dimensions of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. Key areas include geoengineering, carbon dioxide removal technologies, carbon capture, environmental justice, residual emissions in net-zero pathways, and public engagement with emerging climate technologies. Buck investigates how these technologies can be scaled for public benefit, drawing on methods such as interviews, focus groups, surveys, and scenario analysis across disciplines like geography, sociology, environmental science, and science and technology studies.

Buck authored After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (Verso Books, 2019) and co-edited Has It Come to This? The Promise and Peril of Geoengineering on the Brink (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Selected publications include "Negative emissions and the long history of carbon removal" (Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2020), "Why residual emissions matter right now" (Nature Climate Change, 2023), "Rapid scale-up of negative emissions technologies: social barriers and social implications" (Climatic Change, 2016), and contributions to the State of Carbon Dioxide Removal global assessment (2024). She has been awarded the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship and served as a NatureNet Science Fellow. Buck's scholarship informs policy on carbon removal and decarbonization, with current projects analyzing stakeholder views on carbon dioxide removal, residual emissions in global strategies, and carbon management software platforms as climate governance tools. Her work has garnered significant academic impact, evidenced by highly cited publications.