Dr. Ben Caldecott was appointed to the Board Sustainability Committee (BSC) of DBS Group Holdings Ltd. in 2022. He is a member of BSC.
An internationally-recognised sustainable finance expert, Dr. 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.
Prior to joining the University of Oxford, he worked as a Vice President at investment bank Climate Change Capital 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 Director in the Strategy Directorate of the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (on secondment), as a Deputy Director in the Strategy Directorate of the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (on secondment), as Sherpa to the UK Green Investment Bank Commission, and as the Senior Advisor to the Chair and CEO of the UK Green Finance Institute.
In addition to his current role at Oxford, he is the founding Director and Principal Investigator of the UK Centre for Greening Finance & Investment, established as the UK’s national research and innovation centre. He is also a member of the advisory board of Climate Impact X, a joint venture between DBS, Singapore Exchange, Standard Chartered Bank and Temasek Holdings.
He has also conceived and initiated a number of initiatives related to sustainable finance. They include being founder and co-chair of the Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investment, an alliance of global research universities promoting rigorous and impactful academic research on sustainable finance. He also established the Spatial Finance Initiative, which aims to mainstream geospatial capabilities enabled by space technology and data science into financial decision-making globally.
He also serves on the Adaptation Committee of the UK Climate Change Committee and is co-head of the Transition Plan Taskforce established by HM Treasury in 2022 to advise on net zero transition plans. In 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.
Ben graduated from the University of Oxford with a doctorate in economic geography. 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.
