Ben Caldecott

Dr Ben Caldecott is the founding Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group and is the inaugural Associate Professor of Sustainable Finance at the University of Oxford, a post maintained by an endowment and the first ever endowed professorship of sustainable finance, and a Supernumerary Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. He is a Co-Director for the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery. 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 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. In 2022 ministers appointed him to the Adaptation Committee of the UK Climate Change Committee, the statutory body created under the Climate Change Act 2008, where he served until the end of 2025. From 2020 to 2026 he also served two terms on the Export Guarantees Advisory Council of UK Export Finance (UKEF), a statutory body that advises the UK export credit agency and its ministers. From 2019 to 2022 he was a member of 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 to 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.