2022 Climate Risk Symposium

Julie Baddeley is one of the U.K.’s most experienced women directors having served in an executive and non-executive capacity on the boards of leading companies in the FTSE 100 and 250 indices, as well as major public sector organizations.

In 2001 she moved to a portfolio career and has served as a director across a range of sectors including consumer, retail, financial services, professional services and global industrial. She was chairman of global recruitment company Harvey Nash plc until its sale in 2018.

At the Said Business School, Julie coached top business teams from around the world on the execution of business strategy, having previously been the partner in charge of Accenture’s change management practice in Europe. She was Executive Director at Woolwich plc responsible for HR, IT and the insurance businesses.

Julie is active in raising the awareness of boards of U.K. quoted companies on the impact of climate change on their business models and balance sheets as well as the impact they are having on the global climate. She is Director of the Hughes Hall Centre for Climate Change Engagement, which aims to bring Cambridge University thinking on climate science, law, regulation, risk and communication into the boardroom.

Amra Balic, is Managing Director and Head of BlackRock's EMEA Investment Stewardship team based in London. She is responsible for leading BlackRock's investment stewardship efforts covering company engagement including voting in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa on behalf of BlackRock's clients globally. The team engages companies and others in the investment stewardship ecosystem to promote governance and business practices aligned with long-term value creation. Amra is a member of the Stewardship Global Executive Committee and EMEA Executive Investments Subcommittee.  

She currently serves on several industry bodies and initiatives to enhance governance and sustainable business practices including the U.K. Investment Association’s Stewardship Committee, the U.K. Institute of Directors Center for Corporate Governance Advisory Board, the FRC Investor Advisory Board, Eumedion General Board, the U.K. Investor Forum Board of Directors, and the ECGRF Board of Trustees. Previously Amra was a member of the European Commission (EC) Expert Group on technical aspects of corporate governance processes and the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (U.K.) Stewardship Advisory Group. 

Prior to joining BlackRock, Amra spent 14 years working on issues surrounding investors and investment decisions ranging from fixed income analysis, deal origination, investment appraisal, and management of research and analytical content.

Jake joined Wespath in January 2020. As the director of Sustainable Investment Stewardship (SIS) for Wespath and its subsidiaries’ investment programs, he leads Wespath’s shareholder advocacy and engagement efforts. 

Specifically, the SIS team focuses on engagement efforts that align with the values of The United Methodist Church and support the transition to a sustainable global economy. Previously Jake was an institutional consultant at Morgan Stanley’s Graystone Consulting where he focused on engagement with faith-based and impact-oriented institutional investors. Jake co-chairs the Catholic Impact Investing Collaborative, serves on the Climate Crisis Leadership Group for the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) and serves on the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) Stewardship Advisory Committee. 

Jake received his bachelor’s degree in Economics, International Studies and Political Science from Ohio Wesleyan University. He also holds the Certified Investment Management Analyst (CIMA) designation.

Will joined Rabobank in 2007, becoming CRO Europe in 2015. In this capacity he’s responsible for ensuring a consistent market, credit and operational risk framework, providing effective portfolio information and proactive risk management, advising on trends and risks in the portfolio and representing the risk function at a global level. He sits on Executive, Risk Management and Credit Committees for Europe among others, and as of July 2020 Will also became General Manager London and CEO Europe ad interim where he is responsible for executing Rabobank’s ‘Banking for Food’ strategy in Europe.

Will is passionate about transformation and change and digital innovation. He spearheads the climate risk agenda and has also been instrumental in developing Rabobank’s ‘Brexit’ plans and more recently the risk controls throughout the ongoing Covid-19 crisis.

Will has over 15 years of banking experience covering corporate and commercial banking, structured credit, trading and risk management.

Adam is the Co-Director of the Investment Team responsible for Ethics and Engagement for the Church of England Pensions Board; he is also the Chair of the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI) and a Board Member of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, (IIGCC). He co-leads engagement with Royal Dutch Shell on behalf of the global investor engagement initiative, Climate Action 100+, that led to the 2018 joint statement on climate targets agreed between Shell and institutional investors as well as Shell’s 2021 Net Zero Commitment. 

Following the Brumadinho Tailings Dam disaster that killed 270 people in Brazil in January 2019, Adam set up and co-led the Mining and Tailings Safety Initiative with John Howchin, Secretary General of the Council on Ethics of the Swedish National Pension Funds. He also represents the U.N.-backed Principles for Responsible Investment as a co – convenor of the Global Tailings Review that produced the first ever Global Tailings Standard. He is now working together with the U.N. and the Swedish Pension Funds to establish an independent global institute to implement the Standard and drive safety standards across the mining industry.

Adam founded the $24 trillion-backed Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI), an asset owner-led and asset manager-supported global initiative that assesses companies’ preparedness for the transition to the low carbon economy (and publishes this through the London School of Economics). Adam is also the lead for the Church of England on the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative (MFRI), a forum that convenes dialogues between mining company CEOs and Church leaders. Recently he set up and co-chairs with the Dutch fund APG the Paris Aligned Investing Initiative of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC) that produced the first global Net Zero Investment Framework for pension funds and investment managers.

Adam also served as a member of the Royal College of Physicians Investment Advisory Board and on the Pension and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) Stewardship Advisory Group.

Catherine joined LGIM in 2015 to help drive ESG integration into mainstream investment fund research and strengthen sustainability engagements. Prior to this, she spent four years working with governments in Africa and Asia on their sustainable policies, planning, and management of the extractives sector, and five years in sell-side equity research.

Jo Paisley has worked on a variety of risk areas at GRI, including stress testing, operational resilience, model risk management, and climate risk. Jo’s career began at the Bank of England where she worked in various economist roles, ran the Statistics Division, and spent the last part of her career in supervision. Her last role was as a Director of the Supervisory Risk Specialist Division within the Prudential Regulation Authority. This area provided deep technical risk expertise to front line supervisors across all risk disciplines, covering banking and insurance. She was also heavily involved in the design and execution of the U.K.’s first concurrent stress test in 2014.

Jo left the Bank in 2015 and joined HSBC as their Global Head of Stress Testing, where she was responsible for ensuring that they met all their regulatory stress testing requirements around the world. She has also worked as an independent stress testing consultant, advising firms on how to get the most value out of stress testing. Jo studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, before completing her MPhil in Economics at Nuffield College, Oxford.

John Scott is Head of Sustainability Risk for the Zurich Insurance Group. For the last fifteen years, in his roles as CRO for Commercial Insurance and as Head of Sustainability Risk, John has increasingly focused on global risks, in particular climate change risk. John is on the Advisory Board to the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Risks Report and has contributed to every WEF Global Risk Report since 2005. He is also on the WEF Advisory Board for the Energy Transition Initiative and the IEA (International Energy Agency) Finance Institution Advisory Board, fostering a dialogue between the IEA and the finance community on clean energy transitions. 

In the UK John is an Honorary Professor at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction at University College London (UCL) and is a member of the Expert Advisory Group (EAG) on Sustainability for the Institute of Directors.

David Tyler is the Chairman of Domestic & General and of The White Company. He is an experienced chairman, having also served in this role at several other companies including J Sainsbury plc, Hammerson plc and Logica plc.

David’s 45 years of experience in executive and non-executive roles spans the consumer, retail, business services and financial services sectors. His executive career was at Unilever, NatWest, Christie’s and GUS. Following the de-merger of GUS in 2006, he went plural and has served on the Boards of Experian, Burberry, Reckitt Benckiser and 3i Quoted Private Equity, as well as the companies noted above.

David is also co-chair of the Parker Review Committee (ethnic diversity on Boards) and a founding chair of Chapter Zero (addressing the challenge of climate change).

Sylvain Vanston is Executive Director, Climate Investment Research at MSCI. He helps formulate a research agenda for MSCI’s climate-related content and works with strategic clients on issues including climate risk reporting, risk management, portfolio management, climate metrics, and biodiversity.

Sylvain represents MSCI with key organizations including the TCFD, GFANZ, and SBTi. He previously worked at the AXA Group as global head of Climate & Biodiversity, covering both investments and insurance underwriting policy development as well as leading AXA’s work within the Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance, Net-Zero Insurance Alliance, TCFD and TNFD. His academic background is in International Relations as he completed a combined program at Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics.

Thomas Verbraken is a Budapest-based Executive Director at MSCI and head of Risk Management Solutions Research. His focus is to provide insights on investment problems and market risk through the lens of MSCI’s proprietary tools and data.

He is also an active contributor to stress testing research, including the development of a best practices framework and the continuous design of topical stress test scenarios. Prior to joining MSCI, Thomas earned a PhD in Applied Economics and a Masters in Civil Engineering at the KU Leuven, Belgium. He is a CFA® charter holder.

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