Appendix C

Planning Committee Biographies

Eric J. Kemp-Benedict (Co-Chair) is a senior economist and director of the Equitable Transitions program at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) U.S. Center. He was SEI’s Asia Center director 2013–2016 and has served in various SEI global leadership roles. Kemp-Benedict’s research focuses on the macroeconomics of a sustainability transition, addressing questions around long-run growth, decoupling, structural change, and economic development. He contributes to interdisciplinary studies on diverse topics of relevance to sustainability at national, regional, and global levels. He is also a key contributor to the shared socioeconomic pathways, part of the global climate scenario framework that underpins a wide range of climate studies. Kemp-Benedict is a member of the National Academies’ Roundtable on Macroeconomics and Climate-Related Risks and Opportunities.

Timothy M. Lenton (Co-Chair) is the founding director of the Global Systems Institute and Chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter. He has more than 25 years of research experience in studying Earth as a system and developing and using models to understand its behavior. His books Revolutions That Made the Earth (with Andrew Watson) and Earth System Science: A Very Short Introduction have popularized a new scientific view of Earth. He coauthored the “Planetary Boundaries” framework and is renowned for his work identifying climate tipping points. This award-winning work led him to examine positive tipping points within social systems that could help accelerate progress toward a more sustainable future. His accolades include the Philip Leverhulme Prize, 2004; European Geosciences Union Outstanding Young Scientist

Award, 2006; Times Higher Education Award for Research Project of the Year, 2008; Royal Society of London William Smith Fund, 2008; and Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, 2013. He is a member of the Earth Commission, an Institute for Scientific Information Highly Cited Researcher, and in the top 100 of the Reuters “Hot List” of the world’s top climate scientists. He is also a Turing fellow and a fellow of the Linnean Society, Geological Society, and Society of Biology. Lenton is a member of the National Academies’ Roundtable on Macroeconomics and Climate-Related Risks and Opportunities.

Brad R. Colman is president of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). Before AMS, he was director of Weather Strategy for the Climate Corporation, where he oversaw and guided the design and execution of the Bayer & Climate Enterprise weather programs. The program spans global weather stations, data acquisition and validation, data repository architecture and dissemination, and domain expertise. Central to this effort was Colman’s close collaboration with the Climate Corporation’s weather science team, which developed unique weather, climate, and decision support information for the global agricultural industry. Before the Climate Corporation, Colman worked for nearly 2 years on a Microsoft team chartered to grow a new consumer weather service to serve the entire Microsoft ecosystem. Before joining the private sector, he enjoyed a long and diverse career with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where he worked at the National Weather Service’s forecast office in Seattle, Washington and NOAA’s Environmental Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado and was acting director of NOAA’s Meteorological Development Laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland. Colman is a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, co-chair of NOAA’s Science Advisory Board’s Environmental Information Services Working Group, and a member of the National Academies’ Roundtable on Macroeconomics and Climate-Related Risks and Opportunities.

Wendy Edelberg is the director of the Hamilton Project and a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. She joined Brookings in 2020, after more than 15 years in the public sector. She is a macro-economist whose research has spanned a wide range of topics, from household spending and saving decisions to the economic effects of fiscal policy to systemic risks in the financial system. Most recently, she was chief economist at the Congressional Budget Office. Before that, Edelberg was the executive director of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which released its report on the causes of the financial crisis in January 2011. Earlier, she worked on issues related to macroeconomics, housing, and consumer spending at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during two

administrations. Before that, she worked on those same issues at the Federal Reserve Board. She is the co-chair of the National Academies’ Roundtable on Macroeconomics and Climate-Related Risks and Opportunities and was a member of the planning committee on Strengthening the Evidence Base to Improve Economic and Social Mobility in the United States in 2021.

Sathya Gopalakrishnan is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences at The Ohio State University. She is also on the faculty of the Environmental Science Graduate Program and a founding member and former director of the STEAM Factory—a diverse and inclusive grassroots faculty network at OSU committed to interdisciplinary research, community engagement, and education. Gopalakrishnan’s research is motivated by an interest in applying economic theory to understand ubiquitous interdependencies between human decisions and geophysical processes in complex resource systems. She focuses on developing coupled models of complex human and natural systems, applied to coastal and water resources; nonmarket valuation of environmental amenities and risks; and resource management problems in which environmental and economic systems are linked by spatial-dynamic processes. She serves as an associate editor for the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, chair of the Committee for Women in Agricultural Economics, and member of the board of directors of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. Gopalakrishnan is a member of the National Academies’ Roundtable on Macroeconomics and Climate-Related Risks and Opportunities.

Lori Hunter is director of the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is also professor of sociology. Hunter’s research and teaching focus on links between environmental context and human population dynamics. Specific settings include rural South Africa and Mexico, where her scholarship connects rural livelihood strategies, including migration, to local shifts in rainfall, temperature, and natural resource availability. She has been an invited speaker on the topic of migration and climate change at a variety of settings, including the United Nations, National Academies, Rio+20 Earth Summit, Future Earth, and French Demographic Research Institute. Hunter received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1997. She is a member of the National Academies’ Board on Environmental Change and Society and its liaison to the National Academies’ Committee on Managed Retreat on the Gulf Coast. Hunter is also a member of the National Academies’ Roundtable on Macroeconomics and Climate-Related Risks and Opportunities.

Paulina Jaramillo is a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focused on life-cycle assessment of energy systems with an emphasis on climate change impacts and mitigation research. She is involved in multidisciplinary research projects to better understand the social, economic, and environmental implications of a low-carbon transition in the U.S. energy system. Over the past 5 years, her research and education efforts have expanded to include issues related to energy access and development in the Global South. She has also worked to incorporate values and beliefs in energy planning in historically disenfranchised communities and understand the implications of energy access in gender equity. She was a coordinating lead author for the Transportation chapter of the Working Group III report that was part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Climate Assessment Report. She was a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Jaramillo is a member of the National Academies’ Roundtable on Macroeconomics and Climate-Related Risks and Opportunities.