Ben Caldecott

Ben Caldecott (born 1985) is a British academic working in sustainable finance. He is the founding director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group at the University of Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and the Associate Professor of Sustainable Finance, a post endowed in 2020 with funds from the Swiss banking group Lombard Odier and the first endowed professorship in the field at a major research university. He is a Supernumerary Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford.

In 2022, Apolitical named Caldecott one of the "100 Most Influential People in Climate Policy". The ENDS Report included him on its UK Power List of environmental professionals the same year. He read economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, specialising in development and China. He holds a doctorate in economic geography from Brasenose College, University of Oxford. He held civil service secondments at the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. According to a 2023 profile in Tagesspiegel, Caldecott was among the first to warn central banks, including the Bank of England, about the financial stability implications of stranded assets, initially meeting scepticism before the concept entered mainstream supervisory practice. He was an Academic Visitor at the Bank of England from 2014 to 2019. In 2011, he argued in The Guardian that high-carbon investment could become a systemic risk comparable to the sub-prime crisis.

He initiated the Spatial Finance Initiative, which applies geospatial data and remote sensing to financial analysis, and co-founded the Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investment (GRASFI), an alliance of research universities which he co-chaired from 2017 to 2023.

Policy work

From 2022 to 2024, Caldecott co-headed the Secretariat of the Transition Plan Taskforce (TPT), established by HM Treasury at COP26 to develop a disclosure framework for corporate climate transition plans. In 2024, the IFRS Foundation assumed responsibility for the TPT's materials, integrating them into guidance for IFRS S2.

He serves as Coordinating Lead Author for finance in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Seventh Assessment Report (Working Group III). Writing in The Guardian, George Monbiot questioned the appropriateness of Caldecott's trusteeship given his former position at Policy Exchange, whose founding chair was Michael Gove, one of the ministers the RSPB had criticised.

Selected publications