Ben Caldecott
Trustee
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 concurrently an Academic Visitor at the Bank of England and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Advisor at SYSTEMIQ and Highmore LLC, as well as a Policy Associate at the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), where he is a director-level secondee in the Strategy Directorate providing advice on a range of policy issues, many of which are related to finance, investment, and market design. He has established and led as chair Bright Blue’s research programme on energy and the environment and is a co-founder and board member of the Conservative Environment Network.
Ben specialises in environment, energy, and sustainability issues and works at the intersection between finance, government, civil society, and academe, having held senior roles in each domain. Ben has authored and edited a substantial number of publications related to sustainability and is an experienced media commentator and public speaker. He is also a regular peer reviewer and has a number of board and advisory panel appointments, including with the City of London Green Finance Initiative, UK Green Finance Institute, University of Oxford Socially Responsible Investment Review Committee, The Prince of Wales’s Accounting for Sustainability Project, ATLAS Infrastructure Partners Ltd, the British Standards Institution (BSI), the Natural Capital Finance Alliance, and the Green Alliance.
Prior to joining the University of Oxford he was a Vice President at investment bank Climate Change Capital, one of the early leading asset management and advisory firms focused on the low carbon transition, where he ran the firm’s research centre and advised clients and funds on the development of policy-driven markets. Ben has previously worked as Research Director for Environment and Energy at the think tank Policy Exchange, as Head of Government Advisory at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, as a Deputy Director in the Strategy Directorate of the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, as an Advisor to The Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit, and as Sherpa to the UK Green Investment Bank Commission.
Ben holds a doctorate in economic geography from the University of Oxford. He initially read economics and specialised in development and China at the University of Cambridge and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has been a Visiting Scholar at 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 Non-Resident Fellow at the Payne Institute for Earth Resources at the Colorado School of Mines, a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and Royal Geographical Society, and a Member of the Senior Common Room at Oriel College, Oxford.
