Dr Ben Caldecott is the founding Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group. 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... Read more
Dr Ben Caldecott is the founding Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group. 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.
Ben is an experienced public speaker and 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 has extensive 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.
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.
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 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 currently chairs 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 also 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. He currently serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Natural Capital and Global Cooperation Advisory Board.
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 Reportplaced him on its UK Power List of environmental professionals. Investor newsletter Global Proxy Watchnamed 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.
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.
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.