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 of Sustainable Finance, the first ever endowed professorship of sustainable finance, and a Supernumerary Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. Ben has spent more than twenty years operating at the nexus of finance, policy, and research, working as part of boards and senior management, and with policymakers, regulators, and civil society on how to interpret and shape fast-moving energy, climate, environment, and wider sustainability issues.
Governance and boardroom experience
Ben has more than fifteen years of boardroom experience as a non-executive director across listed companies, leading financial institutions, public bodies, and charities, supporting organisations to navigate risk and uncertainty, develop successful long-term strategies, and uphold robust integrity and governance. He is the only external member of the Board Sustainability Committee of DBS Bank, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, having joined in 2022. Since 2022 he has also been a Trustee of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), Europe’s largest conservation charity. The same year Ministers appointed him to the Adaptation Committee of the UK Climate Change Committee, the statutory body created under the Climate Change Act 2008.
He also serves on the Export Guarantees Advisory Council of UK Export Finance (UKEF), a statutory body that advises the UK export credit agency and its ministers; he was first appointed in 2020 and re-appointed for a second term in 2023. From 2019 to 2022 he sat on the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Climate-Related Market Risk Subcommittee, contributing to the first comprehensive assessment of climate risk to the US financial system. He has also served as a Trustee of the Green Alliance, the UK’s leading independent environmental think tank, from 2010 to 2022, and of the Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative (CCLI) which he co-founded, from 2015-2023. CCLI examines 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.
Ben is an experienced chair and has chaired boards, committees, and high-level working groups across government, finance, and civil society. For example, he is Chair of the Advisory Group for the International Transition Plan Network (ITPN), a coalition of governments and regulators developing global norms for credible climate transition plans. He founded and, from 2017 to 2023, co-chaired 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 chaired the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) Implementation Workstream of the UK Green Finance Taskforce in 2017 to 2018 and, ahead of COP26, chaired the Finance Coalition Coordination Mechanism that mobilised hundreds of financial institutions for the summit.
At Oxford he chairs the judging panel for the Insight Investment – University of Oxford Prize for Greening Finance, recognising world-leading research and service, endowed in perpetuity to celebrate, showcase, and financially reward world-leading research and public service to green the global financial system. He established and is the Faculty Chair of the Public and Third Sector Academy for Sustainable Finance (P3SA) at the University of Oxford, a global centre of learning on sustainable finance for the public and third sectors. He has also chaired organising committees for major international conferences, including the Oxford Sustainable Finance Summit and the GRASFI Annual Conference, and high-level convenings internationally.
Finance sector experience
Ben has advised or partnered with institutions that together manage trillions in assets, across every major asset class and across major financial centres. As a result, he has a uniquely global perspective of how financial institutions and capital markets are responding to climate, energy, and sustainability issues.
Since 2022 he has been a Senior Adviser at Global Infrastructure Partners, one of the world’s largest private equity infrastructure investors and from 2017 to 2025 served on ATLAS Infrastructure’s Climate Advisory Board, where he advised on listed infrastructure portfolios.
Ben currently serves on the Stewardship and Sustainable Investing Advisory Council at Neuberger Berman, Royal London Group’s External ESG Advisory Group, Columbia Threadneedle’s Responsible Investment Advisory Council, and Climate Impact X’s International Advisory Council.
Earlier in his career 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. He also worked at Bloomberg New Energy Finance as Head of Government Advisory.
Research, publications, and academic leadership
Ben holds the first endowed professorship in the field. He founded and directs the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group, a world-leading centre at the University of Oxford focused on aligning finance with global environmental sustainability. He 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 also serves on the Technical Council of the Science-based Targets Initiative (SBTi), the independent deliberation and technical decision-making body that reviews, approves, and recommends adoption of SBTi standards, guidance, and methods.
Ben’s scholarship has had significant impact. Early work on stranded assets showed how environment-related risks could impact company valuations and be a systemic risk for the financial system, work that now informs impairment tests, credit models, and scenario analysis worldwide, reshaping approaches to risk by financial institutions and supervisors. Among other things, he has pioneered spatial finance, integrating geospatial data and analytics into financial theory and practice, as well as conceiving and co-authoring the Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting and developing the concept of the Carbon Removal Budget. His expertise and expert evidence have been recognised in high profile legal cases, including in the Federal Court of Australia and the High Court of England and Wales.
Ben has raised tens of millions of dollars in competitive funding from foundations, research councils, governments, and industry for his work. He has conceived and led a range of significant research partnerships with major financial institutions, including several multi-year and multi-million-dollar collaborations. Partners have included Aviva Investors, Banco Santander, Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas Asset Management, Brunel Pensions Partnership, CCLA Investment Management, HSBC, Impax Asset Management, Insight Investment, Lloyd’s of London, Lombard Odier, Norges Bank Investment Management, Standard Chartered, Temasek, UBS, Wells Fargo, and Willis Towers Watson.
His academic service is wide-ranging. A committed doctoral supervisor, he is currently supervising six Oxford Ph.D./D.Phil. candidates. Alumni of his group now occupy senior posts in both practice and academia, illustrating his contribution to building the next generation of sustainable finance leaders.
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 then at the University of Cambridge. He has been an Academic Visitor at the Bank of England, a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University and Peking University, and held Visiting Fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Sydney, and the University of Melbourne. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Wealth Management Institute in Singapore, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Payne Institute for Earth Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.
Policy engagement
Ben combines scholarship with policy engagement at the highest levels. For example, his work on ending unabated coal informed the UK Government’s 2015 commitment to phase out coal power, one of the world’s first national coal-exit commitments. As an Academic Visitor at the Bank of England between 2014 and 2019 he helped to embed stranded asset and climate-related transition risk into supervisory thinking, shaping central banks’ emerging approaches to climate risk.
From 2022 to 2024 he was Co-Head of the Transition Plan Taskforce (TPT) Secretariat. The TPT was established by HM Treasury at COP26 as an industry-led international initiative to establish best practices for climate transition plans. In October 2024 the TPT merged into the IFRS Foundation, with its materials available to support companies disclosing information about their transition plans when applying IFRS S2.
He has experience as a senior civil servant. From 2019 to 2021 he was seconded to the UK Cabinet Office as the COP26 Strategy Advisor for Finance, laying the groundwork for the Glasgow summit’s finance agenda. Earlier secondments include being a Director in the Strategy Directorate at the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) from 2018 to 2020 and a Deputy Director in the Strategy Directorate at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) from 2010 to 2011. From 2014 to 2017 he was an Advisor to The Prince of Wales’ International Sustainability Unit, he acted as Senior Advisor to the Chair and Chief Executive of the UK Green Finance Institute during its start-up phase from 2019 to 2020, acted as Sherpa to the UK Green Investment Bank Commission in 2010, and served on the Expert Group of the UK Transition Finance Market Review from 2023 to 2024.
Ben has also held senior roles across several policy think tanks. He directed the Environment and Energy Unit at Policy Exchange from 2008 to 2009 and from 2014 to 2019 he founded and chaired Bright Blue’s Energy and Environment programme. He also chaired Onward’s Inflation Prevention Project from 2023 to 2024 and was a member of their Getting to Zero Steering Group from 2020 to 2023.
He currently serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Natural Capital and Global Cooperation Advisory Board.
Lectures, public speaking, and media
Ben is an experienced public speaker and, over the last fifteen years, has delivered hundreds of invited keynotes, lectures, and talks on sustainability topics across six continents. Engagements include global forums such as the World Economic Forum and the OECD, regulators such as the Bank of England, Banque de France, and the European Banking Authority, policy gatherings convened by the UK Government, the European Commission, and Chatham House, and universities ranging from Harvard and Cambridge to Seoul’s KAIST and the University of Sydney. He is also sought after by C-suite audiences at leading banks, asset managers, asset owners, and stock exchanges from New York to Singapore, demonstrating the breadth of demand for his expertise.
Ben teaches and supervises a wide range of students at the University of Oxford and beyond. In addition to supervising Ph.D./D.Phil. students, he established and leads B.A., M.Sc., and M.Phil. 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. In 2018 he won the “Best Pedagogical Innovation” prize at the French Sustainable Investment Forum–Principles for Responsible Investment Awards. He contributes to training and capacity building across different finance professions internationally, including as lead author of the Global Association of Risk Professional’s Sustainability and Climate Risk Certificate textbook. He has previously served as the Academic Advisor to the CFA UK Certificate in Climate and Investing, as an Academic Associate at the Chartered Banker Institute, and on the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ ESG Investment Working Party. He serves on the judging panel for the annual Banque de France Prize for Young Researchers in Green Finance and has done so since its creation in 2018.
In 2023 the German daily Der Tagesspiegel devoted a full background portrait to his career. A year earlier Apolitical included him in its list of the “100 Most Influential People in Climate Policy”, while the ENDS Report placed him on its UK Power List of environmental professionals. Investor newsletter Global Proxy Watch named him a “Star of 2019” for breakthrough impact on corporate governance. He entered Who’s Who in the 2013 edition, then the youngest person outside sport admitted on merit. Earlier distinctions include participation in the US State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program in 2011 and a runner-up in Prospect magazine’s Think Tank Publication of the Year award in 2010.
Selected media experience includes: ABC Lateline, ABC News, ABC Radio National, Associated Press, BBC Local and Regional Radio (various), BBC News, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC World Service, Bloomberg, Business Week, International Herald Tribune, Investments & Pensions Europe, Investors Chronicle, ITV, Metro, Ming Pao, Nature, Platts, Press Association, Reuters, Sky News, The Age, The Atlantic, The Australian Financial Review, The Business Standard, The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, The Ecologist, The Economist, The Economic Times India, The Evening Standard, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Herald, The Hindustan Times, The Huffington Post, The Independent, The Nation, The New York Times, The Nikkei, The Scotsman, The South China Morning Post, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Telegraph, The Times, The Week, and TIME Magazine.
