Eric Kemp-Benedict

Eric Kemp-Benedict is the Equitable Transitions Program Director at SEI US and is based in Somerville, MA. Eric directed SEI Asia from February 2013 until February 2016 and has served in various SEI global leadership roles, starting in 2011 and continuing to the present. 

Eric’s research focuses on the macroeconomics of a sustainability transition. Working within post-Keynesian, structuralist and classical traditions, but viewing the economy through an ecological economics lens, Eric addresses questions around long-run growth, decoupling, structural change, and economic development. 

As a sustainability practitioner, from the time Eric joined SEI in 1997, he has contributed to studies on diverse topics of relevance to sustainability at national, regional, and global levels and has actively developed and applied tools and methods for participatory and study-specific sustainability analyses. Among his other contributions, he is a key contributor to the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), part of the global climate scenario framework that underpins a wide range of climate studies. 

He has a B.S. in physics from the University of Texas in Austin and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Boston University, as well as an MAT in secondary physics education from Tufts University. 

Read Eric’s economics papers on IDEAS and find his teaching module on Green Macroeconomics at Economics in Context.