GARP 2024 Climate and Nature Risk Symposium

Mr. Gordon S. Bennett has been Managing Director at Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (ICE) since February 2015. Mr. Bennett is responsible for the sales and business development of ICE’s global environmental portfolio, the world’s largest environmental marketplace. 

He is a member of the Board of ICE Endex, ICE Futures Abu Dhabi, Spark Commodities and a member of the Strategic Advisory Board of BeZero Carbon. He contributes to a wide range of external environmental and energy market initiatives including a member of the Nature Based Solutions Taskforce of the Sustainable Markets Initiative, the Transition to Net Zero Working Group of the Climate Financial Risk Forum, the City of London VCM Steering Committee, the VCMI Stakeholder Forum, the Advisory Board of the University of Cambridge Energy Policy Research Group and was named Environmental Finance’s sustainable business leader of the year in 2022. 

Prior to ICE, Mr. Bennett spent 12 years at the global energy broker, Spectron, joining as Group Financial Controller and latterly serving as Chief Executive Officer. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales. 

David Carlin leads risk programming for UNEP- Finance Initiative (UNEP FI). He has worked with over 100 financial institutions on topics of climate scenarios, climate risk assessments, and sustainability regulation. He and his team support financial actors across the world to develop best practices for managing environmental risks and identifying environmental opportunities.  

He currently advises UNEP FI’s Task Force on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA). He has also been a technical advisor to the Glasgow Financial Alliances for Net Zero (GFANZ). He is the founder of Cambium Global Solutions, which helps governments, corporations, and financial institutions address the most pressing environmental challenges and thrive in a changing world. 

He is also a contributor to Forbes, where he writes about climate change and leadership and a senior associate at Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). David has worked as a Principal in Finance, Risk, and Public Policy for Oliver Wyman and in Model Risk Management for PNC Bank. His background is in quantitative modeling and decision science. He conducted research in financial decision-making at Carnegie Mellon University and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Williams College. 

Dr. Ron S. Dembo has been an Associate Professor at Yale, visiting professor at MIT, consultant to Goldman Sachs and other large corporations and banks, and an author. He founded Algorithmics which he grew to become the largest supplier of enterprise financial risk systems to banks worldwide before selling it to Fitch. IBM later acquired the firm. 

Ron was made a lifetime fellow of the Fields Institute of Mathematics in 2007 for his contribution to Canadian Mathematics, and has received many awards for his work in optimization risk management and climate change. Currently he is Founder and CEO of RiskThinking.AI, a leader in data and analytics for measuring climate financial risk. He has published many articles in scientific journals and has been awarded numerous worldwide patents.

Panayiotis Dionysopoulos joined ISDA in March 2014, working to advance ISDA’s aims and objectives relating to risk and capital issues. Panayiotis is heading the Capital team at ISDA and the work involves producing industry position papers covering key topics in derivatives, public policy and financial regulation with the support of quantitative impact analysis. The Capital Department is closely involved in the global implementation of all aspects of Basel III, Sustainable Finance and Digital Assets particularly focusing on regulation pertinent to the trading book.

Before joining ISDA, Panayiotis was Treasury Manager at RBS specialising in capital management and Basel III implementation. He also worked in Product Control at ABN AMRO where he started his career. 

Panayiotis holds a MSc in Accounting & Control from Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). Recently he received the INSEAD Executive Certificate in Global Management.

Chris Dodwell is the head of policy and advocacy at Impax Asset Management, a specialist investor focused on opportunities arising from the transition to a sustainable economy. His team is responsible for advising Impax’s investment teams on the impacts of public policy as well as leading the firm’s work to support the development of new policies to accelerate a net-zero, nature-positive transition.

After qualifying as a solicitor at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Dodwell worked on climate policy for the U.K. government for more than a decade, leading its implementation of the European carbon trading system and the U.K. delegation to the international climate negotiations. Later, as director of climate change at Ricardo Energy and Environment, he supported more than 15 countries in developing and implementing their national climate pledges under the Paris Agreement. Lastly, he served as a key member of the team that founded the Climate Finance Accelerator, a U.K.-funded programme aimed at increasing flows of private investment into climate solutions in middle-income countries.

As head of climate at the Bank of England, Chris Faint has responsibility for developing and implementing the Bank's strategic approach to climate change across all of its policy operations. He has been particularly focused on the PRA’s supervisory approach to addressing the financial risks arising from climate change and the development of the Bank's climate scenario analysis exercise (the CBES), which launched in June 2021.

Sean Kidney is CEO of the Climate Bonds Initiative, an international NGO, working to mobilize global capital for climate action. Projects include a green bond definitions and certification scheme with $34 trillion of assets represented on its Board; working with the Chinese central bank on how to grow green bonds in China; market development programs in Brazil, Mexico, ASEAN and Africa; and market tracking services for the green bonds industry. He is a member of the European Commission's Platform on Sustainable Finance, and was a member of its predecessors, the 2017 EU High Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance and the EU Technical Expert Group on Sustainable Finance. He is also a member of green finance committees in China, India, Mexico and Kazakhstan. Sean is also a Professor in Practice at SOAS University of London.

Professor Tim Lenton is founding Director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter and Chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science. He has more than 25-years research experience, focused on modelling of the biosphere biogeochemical cycling and climate and associated tipping points. His books ‘Revolutions that made the Earth’ (with Andrew Watson) and ‘Earth System Science: A Very Short Introduction’ have popularized a new scientific view of our planetary home. Tim co-authored the widely used ‘Planetary Boundaries’ framework and is renowned for his work identifying climate tipping points, which informed the setting of the 1.5oC climate target and associated net zero targets and nationally determined contributions.

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.

Rene has been in JPMorgan for 16 years. He is responsible for embedding the firmwide climate and environmental risk management framework across the legal entities in the EMEA region. As part of his role, Rene leads cross-functional work to help the Firm deliver against regulatory expectations for managing climate risk and to align the framework to best practices in the industry. Prior to his current role, Rene was Head of EM EMEA for Country Risk Management, managing country portfolios across all businesses and working as ratings advisor to numerous sovereigns globally.

Dr. Nicola Ranger is Executive Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Systemic Resilience and leads the Resilience and Development programme of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. She is also co-Chair of the Global Resilience Index Initiative, Director of the Resilience Finance Lab and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking of the Oxford Martin School. 

Nicola specialises in the integration of risk and sustainability issues within decision making and is passionate about the role of finance in sustainability, resilience and inclusive development. She works globally with financial institutions, Central Banks, Governments and International Finance Institutions both to mobilise finance for resilience and sustainability goals and to develop solutions to build resilience globally to shocks. Nicola also holds multiple advisory roles, including as a member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on Sustainable Investment in Low and Middle Income Economies, an Academic Visitor at the Bank of England and more. 

Prior to joining Oxford, Nicola held senior roles in the Smith School, World Bank, DFID (now FCDO), the London School of Economics, Defra, HM Treasury and Risk Management Solutions (now Moody's). She completed her postdoctoral research in climate economics and policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science and holds a doctorate in Atmospheric Physics from Imperial College London.

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.

Dylan founded InfluenceMap in 2015 and has overall responsibility for its global operations. Prior to this, Dylan established a market-leading environmental consultancy in Tokyo which is now ERM Japan. Dylan grew and led a 50-person team engaging in a wide variety of corporate and technical advisory work in Japan and Asia covering environmental audits, land remediation, corporate sustainability, and climate strategies. Dylan grew up in Japan and is currently living in London. He holds an MSc in Environmental Technology from Imperial College and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics from Kings College London.

Dimitri Zenghelis is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute, London School of Economics, Special Advisor for the Wealth Economy Project at the Bennett Institute, University of Cambridge, and Partner at Independent Economics. He headed the Stern Review Team at the Office of Climate Change and was a lead author on the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Previously he was Head of Economic Forecasting at HM Treasury.

Dimitri Zenghelis is Special Advisor for the Wealth Economy Project, Bennett Institute, University of Cambridge and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the at the Grantham Research Institute, London School of Economics. He headed the Stern Review Team at the Office of Climate Change and was a lead author on the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Previously he was Head of Economic Forecasting at HM Treasury.