CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Topics we will focus on include:
- biodiversity and nature
- climate litigation and liability
- climate-related physical and transition risks
- emerging regulatory frameworks and reporting requirements
- engagement and stewardship
- net zero transition plans
- novel machine learning and data science methods
- risk pricing across sectors and asset classes
- spatial finance
- supervision and stress testing
- sustainability-linked products and instruments
09:30 – 10:30
Arrival and Registration
Examination Schools
10:30 – 10:45
Welcome Address
Examination Schools – South School
10:45 – 12:00
Opening Panel Discussion
Examination Schools – South School
Chair: Sophie Robinson-Tillett, Senior Associate, Senior Associate, P3S Academy, University of Oxford
Professor Robert Eccles, Visiting Professor of Management Practice, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Desiree Fixler, LSE Ventures Advisory Board Member, London School of Economics
Franziska Jahn-Madell, Director of Global Stewardship, MFS
Tim Mohin, Chief Sustainability Officer, Persefoni
Carlos Santos, CEO and Chairman, Ethos Asset Management
The past 12 months has been a turning point for sustainable finance on multiple fronts, from product innovation to regulatory change to politicisation to geopolitics.
This opening panel will set the stage for the deep dive discussions we’ll have over the course of the summit. Panellists will reflect on the key macro developments of over last year and what they could mean for the future of sustainable finance.
12:00 – 12:45
Opening Keynote
Examination Schools – South School
Dr Sabine Mauderer, Vice-Chair and Chair-designate, The Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System
12:45 – 14:30
Lunch
Examination Schools – North School
14:30 – 16:00
Plenary Session – Net Zero Transition Plans
Examination Schools – South School
There is rapidly growing interest in net zero transitions plans as a tool to drive decarbonisation. Transition plans could underpin future changes in supervision, policy, access to capital markets, financial products, stewardship and engagement, and the assessment of greenwashing claims.
The UK is the first jurisdiction to mandate net zero transition plans, with this covering all large companies, asset managers, and asset owners (and investment products), initially on a comply or explain basis, as part of new Sustainability Disclosure Requirements from 2023.
HM Treasury also launched a new high-level Transition Plan Taskforce in early 2022. The taskforce has a two-year mandate and has been tasked with, among other things, making recommendations on what good transition plans should look like and the metrics that could be used to track progress towards delivering them.
In this session we’ll explore the latest thinking on net zero transition plans, hear from those involved in the taskforce and experts working on what transitions plans should like for both real economy sectors and finance sub-sectors, and how transition plans are being integrated into regulation internationally.
Chair: Dr Ben Caldecott, Director, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group and the Lombard Odier Associate Professor of Sustainable Finance, University of Oxford
Vanessa Havard-Williams, Partner and Global Head of Environment & Climate Change, Linklaters
Kate Levick, Associate Director, Co-Head, Secretariat, Transition Plan Taskforce
Catherine McKenna, Chair, UN High-Level Expert Group on the Net-Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities
Arne Staal, CEO, FTSE Russell
16:00 – 16:30
Break
Examination Schools – North School
16:30 – 18:00
Session I – Spatial Finance
Examination Schools – South School
‘Spatial finance’ is the integration of geospatial data and analysis into financial theory and practice. Spatial finance leverages advances in geospatial data collection and data science techniques to allow for a truly bottom-up, asset-level assessment of climate and environmental-related financial risks, opportunities and impacts. It offers a new approach of understanding physical and transition climate risk, nature and biodiversity impacts, litigation and liabilities, stewardship and engagement, and potentially much more. In this session we will examine a series of case studies from practitioners and data and analytics providers. The session will have a particular focus on methane, deforestation, and climate resilience. The session is organised in partnership with the Spatial Finance Initiative.
Chair: Beth Burks, S&P Global, Director of Sustainable Finance
Irene Benito, Senior Manager, European Affairs, Planet
Laura García Veléz, Quantitative Analyst, Lombard Odier
Adina Gillepsie, Director Of Business Development, Europe, GHGSat
Kamil Kluza, CPO and Co-Founder, Climate X
Alex Money, Founder and CEO, Oxford Earth Observation
Session II – Standardisation and legislation in sustainability-related reporting
Examination Schools – East School
The world of sustainability-related reporting standards and regulation is evolving rapidly. By October 2022 the EU will have adopted its legislation on the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the work of the IFRS International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) will be well underway.
This session will discuss what these and other global developments mean for reporting, corporate strategy, and investing in practice. How can companies and investors adequately implement the existing reporting frameworks and at the same time prepare themselves for what is to come? Will standards be a helpful mechanism to level the playing field, allowing investors and companies to speak the same language when it comes to sustainability-related topics, or will they only add complexity and workload to an area that already creates a significant reporting burden? Finally, how is the “right” standard even developed and how should it relate to or encompass existing reporting frameworks, regulations, and notions such as single vs double materiality or impact measurement?
Chair: Clara Barby, Senior Partner, Just Climate
Patrick de Cambourg, Board Member, European Financial Reporting Advisory Group
Paul Dickinson, Founding Chair, CDP
Sacha Sadan, Director of ESG, Financial Conduct Authority
Kristina Wyatt, Deputy General Counsel, SVP, Global Regulatory Climate Disclosure, Persefoni
Session III – Spatialising transitions to sustainable finance
Examination Schools – Classroom 6
Finance has a very specific and concentrated geography, dominated by a limited number of financial centres in developed countries. While we would not expect financial centres to be the only centres of sustainable finance, there is little to no attention to the question of where the transition to sustainable finance is taking place. In this session, we will treat financial centres as nodes in a larger system, and we will discuss their role from a multi-scalar perspective. How do nodes outside of financial centres form in emerging and developing countries? How do spatial factors affect financial production, intermediation (including trading) and consumption in a global network? A better understanding of place-specific impacts on sustainability transitions is necessary and even urgent to explain the geographical unevenness of transition.
Chair: Dr Felicia Liu, Research Associate, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group, University of Oxford
Dr Theodor Cojoianu, Associate Professor in Sustainable Finance, Edinburgh University
Dr Janelle Knox-Hayes, Associate Professor of Economic Geography and Planning Head, Environmental Policy and Planning Group, MIT
Linda Zeilina, Chief Executive Officer, International Sustainable Finance Centre
18:30 – 21:00
Reception and Dinner
Divinity School
08:00 – 09:00
Arrival & Refreshments
Examination Schools – North School
09:00 – 10:30
Session IV – ESG and Controversy mapping: an application of machine learning
Examination Schools – South School
Early detection of sustainability-related controversies permits reputational risk attribution to specific companies and the evaluation of subsequent material effects on prices. Controversy mapping is currently one of the most actively developing areas in financial natural language processing (NLP) analytics, network analysis, and sentiment analysis. This session will comprise short presentations followed by a panel discussion aimed at addressing key data challenges in controversy mapping. We will focus on real ‘big data’ sources, such as unstructured high-frequency text data derived from digital news and social media platforms, and their use to establish the links between controversies and share prices, understand the role of ‘market memory’ in market moves, and the material effects of controversy strength.
Chair: Dr Steven Reece, Head of Machine Learning Research and Data Science, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group
Dr Julia Anna Bingler, Fellow, Council on Economic Policies
Priyank Patwa, Director of Product Management, ESG, Morningstar
Dr Richard Peterson, CEO, MarketPsych
Dr Edwin Simpson, Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol
Dr Stefan Zohren, Deputy Director, Oxford-Man Institute, University of Oxford
Session V – Risk pricing across sectors and asset classes: trends and future directions
Examination Schools – East School
The cost of capital is a key transmission mechanism between the financial and real economies as it drives capital allocation. To shift capital flows across the global economy as part of the net zero carbon transition, the cost of capital for dirty assets needs to increase substantially and it needs to fall for clean. This session will explore some of the following questions: How the cost of capital is changing for clean relative to dirty for different technologies and sectors across different jurisdictions? What are the driving changes in the cost of capital, for example, between fossil fuels and renewable energy? How will changing the cost of capital will impact companies and providers of finance and investment?
Chair: Sarah McFarlane, Chief Correspondent, Energy Transition, Thomson Reuters
Tifenn Brandily, Senior Associate, BloombergNEF
Dr Ulf Erlandsson, CEO, Anthropocence Fixed IncomeMedia
Dr Dominic Nash, Head of European Utilities Research, Barclays
Luke Sussams, Head of EMEA ESG and Sustainable Finance, Jefferies
Dr Xiaoyan Zhou, Lead, Sustainable Finance Performance, Transition
10:30 – 11:00
Break
Examination Schools – North School
11:00 – 12:30
Session VI – Stewardship and engagement
Examination Schools – South School
Stewardship and engagement enjoy a surging popularity in the sustainable investing field. In the UK, the recent release of the UK Stewardship Code has only accelerated this trend. Stewardship is meant to promote longer-term value for investors, promote high standards of corporate governance at the individual company level, and create sustainable benefits for the economy, environment, and society. Engagement and voting are tools of stewardship and investors increasingly use them to communicate their priorities and standpoints to companies. Engagements are also done collaboratively to pool resources in addressing system-level issues, such as climate change. Yet, what really is the value and purpose of interactions such as engagements, and how can this value be captured? This session will review the current developments and best practices in stewardship and assess how these differ in different asset classes. What can investors and companies do to make the best of engagements? And how should engagement be reported on? Since engagements are often culturally contingent, we also discuss whether and how stewardship is appropriate in Asian, African and or South American markets.
Chair: Professor Robert Eccles, Visiting Professor of Management Practice, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Professor Rob Bauer, Professor of Finance, Institutional Investors Chair, Maastricht University
Sandra Boss, Senior Managing Director, Global Head of Investment Stewardship, BlackRock
Carine Smith Ihenacho, Chief Governance and Compliance Officer, Norges Bank
Anne Simpson, Global Head of Sustainability, Franklin Templeton
Session VII – Biodiversity and nature
East School
Halting and reversing the ongoing loss and degradation of nature and its biodiversity are amongst the greatest challenges of our time. The current state of play is deeply worrying. The drivers of habitat destruction and biodiversity loss continue and we are not yet able to deploy capital into nature recovery at the scale or pace required, whether at global, national or subnational levels. Nor are we able to properly measure and manage nature-related risks in economic and financial decision-making. This needs to change incredibly quickly.
This session, organised in partnership with the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery at Oxford, will focus on what we should be testing and scaling to shift capital flows. We will explore what needs to happen to create a global financial architecture able to fund and finance nature recovery, how financial regulation and supervision could drive transformations in financial practice, and innovations in measuring nature-related financial risks.
Chair: Dr Ben Caldecott, Director, Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme, Lombard Odier Associate Professor, University of Oxford
Nikki Mardas, Executive Director, Global Canopy
Dr Saskia de Vries, Head of Financial Stability, DNB
Zaneta Sedilekova, Biodiversity Risk Consultant, CCLI
Professor Nathalie Seddon, Professor of Biodiversity and Director, Nature-based Solutions Initiative, University of Oxford
12:30 – 14:00
Lunch
Examination Schools – North School
14:00 – 15:15
Session VIII – Climate litigation and liability
Examination Schools – South School
Litigation has the potential to help drive the transition to a net zero economy by holding corporations and financial entities to their net zero transition plans, and to re-allocate capital where liability risks are priced into financial decision-making. Yet the risks, opportunities and impacts of climate litigation are not widely understood by financial market participants, regulators and academics alike. We will explore the role of law and litigation in holding companies and financial institutions to account for a failure to prepare, disclose or implement net zero transition plans. What role can and should investors and financial institutions play to support litigation to align corporate and financial decision-making with climate goals? How can litigation risk be factored into financial decision-making? What are the implications for efforts by financial institutions, investors, credit rating agencies and prudential regulators looking to use this analysis in financial decision-making and capital regulation?
Chair: Dr Thom Wetzer, Associate Professor of Law and Finance and Director of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, University of Oxford
Sarah Barker, Partner, Head of Climate Risk Governance, MinterEllison
John Firth, Senior Director, Climate & Resilience Hub, Willis Towers Watson
Vesselina Haralampieva, Senior Counsel, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
Catherine Higham, Climate Change Laws of the World Coordinator, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change & the Environment
Ellie Mulholland, Executive Director, Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative
Dr Javier Solana, Senior Lecturer, University of Glasgow
Linus Steinmetz, Strategy, International Affairs and Fundraising, Fridays for Future DE
Session IX – Supervision and stress testing
Examination Schools – East School
Current backward-looking financial risk management practices have been deemed insufficient to capture the long-term horizon and fundamental uncertainty associated with climate change. Various central banks have run or are planning to run forward-looking climate stress tests that examine the effects of a wide range of physical and transition risk scenarios on the stability of the financial system.
This session will discuss current best practices, and the future of climate stress testing as well as its potential over the next 10 years.
Chair: Dr Saskia de Vries, Head of Financial Stability, DNB
Irene Heemskerk, Head of the Climate Change Centre, European Central Bank
Joseph Noss, Senior Director, Financial Services, Willis Towers Watson
Dr Nicola Ranger, Deputy Director, UK Centre for Greening Finance & Investment, Head of Sustainable Finance Research for Development, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group, University of Oxford
15:15 – 15:45
Break
Examination Schools – North School
15:45 – 17:00
Session X – Climate-related physical risk
Examination Schools – South School
Physical risk is often seen as more remote than transition risk, particularly for wealthier countries. But COVID has taught us that risks can interact in complex ways and cascade globally. This session will draw upon the evidence on systemic risks related to physical climate shocks, including compound risks and cascading global physical risks. In this session, we will showcase the latest science in this area and identify potential hot spots of risk.
Chair: Dr Nicola Ranger, Deputy Director, UK Centre for Greening Finance & Investment, Head of Sustainable Finance Research for Development, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group, University of Oxford
Professor Rama Cont, Statutory Professor of Mathematics, University of Oxford
Professor Irene Monasterolo, Professor of Climate Finance, EDHEC Business School
Dr Olivier Mahul, Practice Manager, Crisis and Disaster Risk Finance, World Bank
Adityadeb Mukherjee, Head of ESG, Lloyds Banking Group
Tom Perkins, Catastrophe & Climate Risk Analyst, Bank of England
Session XI – Sustainability-linked products and instruments
Examination Schools – East School
Sustainability-linked loans and bonds can effectively promote credible transitions by borrowers and issuers. Their main innovation lies in the way they tie the cost of capital with sustainability performance. As a new financial instrument, they face multiple challenges and risks. A few examples include the comparability, relevance and ambition of metrics, as well as the materiality of penalties and discounts in the cost of capital. This session will provide an overview of the challenges and opportunities arising in the sustainability-linked debt markets and how to build a robust framework for selecting key performance indicators while ensuring a credible corporate transition.
Chair: Madeleine Jenkins, Reporter, Environmental Finance
Maher Al-Haffar, CFO at Cemex & Founding member of the UN Global Compact CFO Coalition for the SDGs
Farnam Bidgoli, Managing Director, Head of ESG Solutions, HSBC
José Luis Reséndiz, DPhil Candidate and Research Assistant, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group, University of Oxford
Robert Sawbridge, Head of Responsible Investment, Insight Investments
17:00 – 17:30
Break – Transfer to The Sheldonian
The Sheldonian Theatre
17:30 – 19:00
Closing Debate: This House believes…
The Sheldonian
Proposition:
Desiree Fixler, Chair, VentureESG
Jakob Thomä, Managing Director, 2° Investing Initiative
Sarah Williamson, CEO, FCLTGlobal
Opposition:
Paul Dickinson, Executive Chairman, CDP
Huw van Steenis, Co-Chair, World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Finance
Other speaker TBC
19:00 – 19:30
Break – Transfer to The Ashmolean
The Ashmolean Museum
19:30 – 22:00
Reception and Dinner
The Ashmolean
22:00 – Late
Conference party
Vaults, The Ashmolean
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