The Future of Measuring Environmental Risk and Opportunity in Investment Portfolios

Transcription

1 The Future of Measuring Environmental Risk and Opportunity in Investment Portfolios The University Club of San Francisco 29th March 2016 In Partnership with:

2 The Future of Measuring Environmental Risk and Opportunity in Investment Portfolios The University of Oxford s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, in partnership with Risky Business and Ceres, is organizing an event in San Francisco on Tuesday 29th March 2016 on the future of measuring exposure to environmental risk and opportunity in investment portfolios. In February 2016 the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) which is responsible for macroprudential oversight across the European Union joined the Bank of England and the G20 Financial Stability Board (FSB) in highlighting how a late and abrupt transition to a low carbon economy could have implications for financial stability. While the ESRB emphasised the need to pre-emptively manage stranded asset risk in financial institutions and throughout the financial system as a whole, without better data availability this will be extremely challenging. Correcting this major gap is now an urgent priority. In parallel, the new Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), established in December 2015 by Mark Carney as Chair of the FSB and chaired by Michael Bloomberg, has been created to make recommendations on these issues by the end of These will have a very significant role in ensuring that different users of data have what they need to manage the risks recently identified by the ESRB, Bank of England, FSB, and others. The event will explore the opportunities to transform the way investors measure company exposure to environmental risk and opportunity. Advanced analytics, big data, artificial intelligence, and remote sensing could give asset managers and asset owners, as well as regulators and civil society, critically important information on environmental performance currently missing from existing corporate-level voluntary reporting. The aim of the event is to develop a view on how these new approaches could support the objectives of the TCFD and what new research could be done in these areas. Tuesday, 29 th March 2016 Agenda 09:30 10:00 Arrival at the Main Dining Room, The University Club of San Francisco 800 Powell Street, San Francisco, CA :00 10:05 Welcome and Opening Remarks 10:05 10:25 Dave Jones, California Insurance Commissioner 10:25 10:45 Ben Caldecott, Director, Sustainable Finance Programme, Oxford Smith School The Future of Measuring Environmental Risk and Opportunity in Investment Portfolios 2

3 10:45 12:30 Panel Discussion Chair: Kate Gordon, Vice Chair, Paulson Institute Discussants: Larry Brilliant, Acting Chair, Skoll Global Threats Fund Carl Pope, Inside Straight Strategies and former Executive Director of the Sierra Club Jean Rogers, Founder & CEO, Sustainability Accounting Standards Board Rainer Sternfeld, Founder & CEO, Planet OS 12:30 12:35 Closing Remarks Speaker Biographies Dave Jones is California's Insurance Commissioner. He was first elected Insurance Commissioner on November 2, 2010 and re-elected November 4, Jones leads the California Department of Insurance and regulates the California insurance market. Insurers collect $259 billion a year in premiums in California, making it the nation's largest insurance market. Jones served in the California State Assembly from 2004 through 2010, where he chaired the Assembly Health Committee, the Assembly Judiciary Committee and the Budget Subcommittee on Health and Human Services. Named "Consumer Champion" by the California Consumer Federation, Capitol Weekly named Jones California's "most effective legislator" other than the Assembly Speaker and the Senate President Pro Tempore. The American Psychiatric Association awarded Jones its prestigious Jacob K. Javits Public Service Award in 2015 for his work on mental health parity. In addition, Jones received the Phillip Burton Award for Courage from the Orange County Labor Federation on April 23, Jones began his career as a legal aid attorney, providing free legal assistance to the poor with Legal Services of Northern California from 1988 to In 1995, Jones was one of only 13 Americans awarded the prestigious White House Fellowship. He served in the Clinton Administration for three years as Special Assistant and Counsel to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. Jones served on the Sacramento City Council from 1999 to Ben Caldecott is Director of the Sustainable Finance Programme at the University of Oxford s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. The Sustainable Finance Programme incorporates and builds on the Stranded Assets Programme that he founded in He is concurrently an Adviser to The Prince of Wales s Accounting for Sustainability Project, an Academic Visitor at the Bank of England, and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. 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. The Future of Measuring Environmental Risk and Opportunity in Investment Portfolios 3

4 Professor Gordon L. Clark FBA is the Director of the University of Oxford s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. He also holds a Professorial Fellowship at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He is, as well, Sir Louis Matheson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Monash University's Faculty of Business and Economics (Melbourne) and a Visiting Professor at Stanford University. Previous academic appointments have been at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Law School (Senior Research Associate), the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon's Heinz School and Monash University. Other honours include being Andrew Mellon Fellow at the US National Academy of Sciences and Visiting Scholar Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst at the University of Marburg. Kate Gordon is Vice Chair of Climate and Sustainable Urbanization at the Paulson Institute, where she provides overall strategy and coordination for the Institute s climate change, air quality, and sustainable urbanization programs both in the US and China. She is also a nonresident Fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal as one of the paper s Energy Experts. Gordon is a nationally recognized expert on the intersection of clean energy and economic development. Before joining the Paulson Institute, she was Senior Vice President for Climate and Energy at Next Generation, a non-partisan think tank based in San Francisco, where she worked on California policy development as well as large-scale national communications and research projects. While at Next Generation, she helped launch and lead the Risky Business Project, co-chaired by Michael Bloomberg, Henry Paulson, and Tom Steyer, and focused on the economic risks the U.S. faces from unmitigated climate change. Larry Brilliant is the founding President of the Skoll Global Threats Fund and currently serves as Chairman of the Skoll Global Threats Fund Board of Directors and Senior Advisor to Jeff Skoll. He previously was Vice President of Google and Executive Director of Google.org. Larry is an MD and MPH, board-certified in preventive medicine. He lived and worked in India for ten years and was on the UN team that led the successful World Health Organization smallpox eradication program. He did his undergraduate in Philosophy at the U of M, his MD at Wayne Medical School and came back to do his MPH at the U of M. Later he joined the faculty from 1977 to 1986, first as assistant professor of health planning and international health and later, as associate professor of epidemiology at the U of M School of Public Health. He has authored two books and dozens of scientific articles on infectious diseases, blindness and international health policy. Carl Pope is the former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club. He's now the principal advisor at Inside Straight Strategies, looking for the underlying economics that link sustainability and economic development and serves as a senior advisor to former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He has served on the Boards of the California League of Conservation Voters, Public Voice, National Clean Air Coalition, California Common Cause, Public Interest Economics Inc, and Zero Population Growth. Mr. Pope is also the author of The Future of Measuring Environmental Risk and Opportunity in Investment Portfolios 4

5 three books: Sahib, An American Misadventure in India; Hazardous Waste In American and co-author along with Paul Rauber Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress, which the New York Review of Books called "a splendidly fierce book." Jean Rogers is the CEO and Founder of SASB. Since 2010 SASB developed from an idea formulated in collaboration with the Harvard University Initiative for Responsible Investment at the Kennedy School of Government into a globally-respected, ANSI-accredited, independent standards-setting organization. Jean draws upon her 20 years experience in sustainability and management consulting across a wide range of industries including utilities, extractives, financials, and real estate. She has worked with international clients to integrate sustainability into strategy and operations, minimizing risk and maximizing returns across the triple bottom line. Jean s leadership experience includes 10 years as a Principal at Arup, a global engineering consultancy focused on sustainable development. Jean was also a management consultant at Deloitte, working in the environmental and manufacturing practices to help leading companies improve business and product performance through sustainability. Rainer Sternfeld is the Founder and CEO at Planet OS, a Silicon Valley Industrial IoT company with a development office in Estonia. The company has been working with largescale geospatial sensor data since 2012 when it first launched Marinexplore, an open data portal for ocean datasets. Since then Planet OS has collaborated with tens of large enterprises such as RWE and Bravante, and government agencies such as NOAA and NASA, solving data access and decision support problems. A robotics engineer and product developer by training, Rainer is an experienced Estonian entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, focused on data-driven businesses that grow enterprise value. Prior to Planet OS, Sternfeld led ABB Group to establish the world s first nation-wide fastcharging infrastructure for electric cars in Estonia. In his five years at ABB Baltic States team (1,300 people), Rainer led the initiatives for new business development, product strategy, operational excellence and enterprise IT. Rainer also serves on the Board of Directors of the World Ocean Council, is the co-designer of the Statue of Liberty of Estonia, and has helped to build successful new businesses in CAD, product design, and industrial machining. The Future of Measuring Environmental Risk and Opportunity in Investment Portfolios 5

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