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 operates 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 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.

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.

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, the World Federation of Exchanges’ ESG Advisory Group, and Climate Impact X’s International Advisory Council. From 2014 to 2021 he served on the University of Oxford’s Socially Responsible Investment Review Committee.

Ben currently serves on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as Coordinating Lead Author for finance as part of Working Group III in the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7).

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.