Climate Action
Why the world needs a carbon removal budget, not just a carbon budget
Establishing a global carbon removal budget could help countries and companies boost their net-zero transition planning in a more effective and equal way.
Ben Caldecott
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 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. He is a Visiting Professor at the Wealth Management Institute in Singapore.
Ben specialises in environment, climate, energy, and sustainability issues and works at the intersection between finance, public policy, and academe, having held senior roles in each domain. He has authored and edited a substantial number of publications related to sustainability and is an experienced media commentator and public speaker. 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. He is a regular peer reviewer and has a number of trustee, board, and advisory panel appointments, including serving as a Trustee of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and on the UK Climate Change Committee’s Adaptation Committee, as well as on DBS Bank’s Board Sustainability Committee, UK Export Finance’s Export Guarantees Advisory Council, and the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) Technical Council.
He has conceived and initiated a series of successful organisations, initiatives, and programmes related to sustainable finance. Ben founded and served for six years as the inaugural 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 is Chair of the Judging Panel for the annual Insight Investment – University of Oxford Prize for Greening Finance, endowed in perpetuity to celebrate, showcase, and financially reward world-leading research and public service to green the global financial system. He established 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 served as a Trustee 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 (P3SA) at the University of Oxford, a global centre of learning on sustainable finance for the public and third sectors. Ben is also a Co-Director for the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery where he leads its work on finance.
Ben is Chair of the International Transition Plan Network (ITPN) Advisory Group. From 2022, 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. 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, the UK Transition Finance Market Review, UK Government’s Green Technical Advisory Group, and in his capacity as a Member of the UK Green Finance Taskforce, chaired its Workstream on Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) Implementation.
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 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 an Associate Editor of the Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment. Ben is also 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.
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