Dr Ben Caldecott is the founding Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group at the University of Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. At the University of Oxford, he is the inaugural Lombard Odier Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow of Sustainable Finance, the first ever endowed professorship of sustainable finance, and a Supernumerary Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. Ben is also the founding Director and Principal Investigator of the UK Centre for Greening Finance & Investment (CGFI), established by UK Research and Innovation in 2021 as the national centre to accelerate the adoption and use of climate and environmental data and analytics by financial institutions internationally.
Ben specialises in environment, energy, and sustainability issues and works at the intersection between finance, public policy, and academe, having held senior roles in each domain. Ben has authored and edited a substantial number of publications related to sustainability and is an experienced media commentator and public speaker. He is also a regular peer reviewer and has a number of trustee, board, and advisory panel appointments, including with the Green Alliance, The Prince of Wales’ Accounting for Sustainability Project, the UK Department for International Trade’s Export Guarantees Advisory Council, and Climate Impact X’s International Advisory Council. He also an advisor to the Secretariat of the One Planet Sovereign Wealth Fund Initiative and a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange.
He has conceived and initiated a number of initiatives related to sustainable finance. Ben founded and is Co-Chair of the Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investment (GRASFI), an alliance of global research universities promoting rigorous and impactful academic research on sustainable finance. He established and leads the Sustainable Finance Theme at The Alan Turing Institute and initiated the Spatial Finance Initiative, which aims to mainstream geospatial capabilities enabled by space technology and data science into financial decision-making globally. He co-founded and serves on the board of the Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative (CCLI), which is examining the legal basis for directors and trustees to consider, manage, and report on climate-related risk, and the circumstances in which they may be liable for failing to do so. He established and is the Faculty Chair of the Public and Third Sector Academy for Sustainable Finance at the University of Oxford, a global centre of learning on sustainable finance for the public and third sectors. Ben is a Co-Investigator for the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery where he co-leads its work on finance.
Ben chairs the Finance Sector Expert Group for Race to Zero and Race to Resilience and serves on the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero’s Steering Group and on the UK Government’s Green Technical Advisory Group. He co-leads the Secretariat for the high-level Transition Plan Taskforce established by HM Treasury in 2022. From 2019, he was seconded part-time to the UK Cabinet Office for two years to work on COP26 in Glasgow as the COP26 Strategy Advisor for Finance. He has also served on the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Climate-Related Market Risk Subcommittee and in his capacity as a Member of the UK Green Finance Taskforce, chaired its Workstream on Task Force on Climate-related Disclosures (TCFD) Implementation.
Ben teaches and supervises a wide range of students at the University of Oxford and beyond. In addition to supervising PhD/DPhil students, he established and leads BA, MSc, and MPhil options and electives on finance and sustainability. He is an experienced lecturer and tutor and has created and course directs a number of executive education courses at Oxford each year, including: the Sustainable Finance Executive Programme, an introduction to sustainable finance for current and future leaders, and the Climate-related Financial Risk Course, to equip participants with the very latest knowledge, as well as the expertise, networks, and confidence to design and implement practices for measuring and managing climate-related risks. Ben also co-hosts a regular roundtable breakfast meeting in the City of London on sustainable finance with the Centre for the Study of Finance Innovation (CSFI). The ‘Sustainable Finance for Breakfast‘ series brings together a wide range of practitioners to discuss and debate the latest developments in sustainable finance. He contributes to training and capacity building across different finance professions internationally, including as the Academic Advisor to the CFA UK Certificate in Climate and Investing and as lead author of the Global Association of Risk Professional’s Sustainability and Climate Risk Certificate textbook. He serves on CSFI’s Governing Council and has also served as an Academic Associate at the Chartered Banker Institute and on the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ ESG Investment Working Party.
Prior to joining the University of Oxford, he was a Vice President at investment bank Climate Change Capital, one of the early leading asset management and advisory firms focused on the net zero carbon transition, where he ran the firm’s research centre and advised clients and funds on the development of policy-driven markets. Ben has previously worked as Research Director for Environment and Energy at the think tank Policy Exchange, as Head of Government Advisory at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, as a Director in the Strategy Directorate of the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (on secondment), as a Deputy Director in the Strategy Directorate of the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (on secondment), as an Advisor to The Prince of Wales’ International Sustainability Unit, as Sherpa to the UK Green Investment Bank Commission, and as the Senior Advisor to the Chair and CEO of the UK Green Finance Institute.
Ben holds a doctorate in economic geography from the University of Oxford. He initially read economics and specialised in development and China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and the University of Cambridge. He has been an Academic Visitor at the Bank of England, a Visiting Scholar at Peking University, and held Visiting Fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Sydney, and the University of Melbourne. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment. Ben is also a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Payne Institute for Earth Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.
