DBS Group Holdings has appointed Ben Caldecott to its board sustainability committee (BSC) as non-director member. The BSC is chaired by DBS chief executive officer Piyush Gupta and its members comprise current DBS board members Chng Kai Fong, Judy Lee and Tham Sai Choy.
An internationally-recognized sustainable finance expert, 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.
Additionally, 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 to accelerate the adoption and use of climate and environmental data and analytics by financial institutions internationally. 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.
Caldecott has 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 adviser for finance.
