Financial Sustainability Review
Why you should watch: While we have been focused on the Covid crisis, there has been a lot of activity in the climate change space - with new initiatives on standards, a common taxonomy, and on progress towards a net zero carbon target. The UK is probably still in the vanguard, but (despite Trump) the US has made some progress, and the EU is pushing ahead. Asset owners are driving change, but there are interesting new initiatives in the chemicals space (with Unilever ahead) and in biodiversity (particularly reforestation).
This is our regular CSFI monthly wrap-up of what has been going on, and what we should be watching for - this month, with special support from the CBI. The anchor, as always, is Oxford's Ben Caldecott - this time, with back-up from a leading UK fund manager and a French-based ESG rating agency.
Moderator: Andrew Hilton (Director, CSFI)
Panellists: Dr Ben Caldecott is the founding Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme at the University of Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. He is the inaugural holder of the Lombard Odier Associate Professorship and Senior Research Fellowship of Sustainable Finance at the University of Oxford, the first ever endowed professorship of sustainable finance. He is a Supernumerary Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford, and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. Ben is also the COP26 Strategy Advisor for Finance based out of the UK Cabinet Office.
Olivier al-Khatib is the chief data scientist and CTO at Sensefolio, which uses machine learning, NLP and AI to rate more than 20,000 companies on ESG criteria. He was formerly a research analyst at Alliance Benstein and a risk manager at AXA.
Freddie Woolfe is on the global sustainable finance desk at Jupiter Asset Management, which he joined when Jupiter took over Merrian Global Investors, where he was head of responsible investment.