GARP 2025 Climate and Nature Risk Symposium

Patrick Amis is head of the Directorate General Specialised Institutions and LSIs at the European Central Bank, entrusted with the direct supervision of 55 significant banks and the oversight of the less significant institutions within the European Single Supervision Mechanism. He is also in charge of the integration of climate-related risks into the European Central Banks’ supervisory approach. Before his current appointment he joined the ECB in March 2014 as Deputy Director General at the Directorate General Micro-Prudential Supervision I, responsible for the direct supervision of the 30 largest and more complex of the significant institutions in the Eurozone, and then as Director General of LSI oversight.

Before joining the ECB, Patrick Amis had a supervisory career in the Banque de France, which he joined in 1995, where he took a variety of positions in line supervision and prudential policy. He also chaired working groups on accounting, both in the Basel Committee and in the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) and was Deputy Secretary General of CEBS from 2008 to 2010.

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.

Doug works in the Financial & Strategic Risk Division within Natwest Group, focussing on the embedding of climate risk analytics within scenario analysis and wider risk decision making. Doug has led the capability build and delivery of the Natwest Group submission in the Bank of England climate stress test (CBES). He is also responsible for Natwest Group’s Pension Risk team and has held various other roles in the bank, including within operational risk capital and pension strategy. Prior to joining Natwest Group Doug worked for KPMG’s pension consulting business and is a member of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.

Judson Berkey is a Managing Director in the Chief Sustainability Office at UBS based in Zurich where he has worked since 2003 on global risk, regulatory and compliance topics. He currently focuses on sustainable finance policy and regulation including engagement with policymakers and standard setters. He graduated from Harvard Law School and the University of Virginia and is on the board of ECOFACT. He currently chairs the Institute of International Finance Sustainable Finance Working Group and is a member of the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures.

Nigel has been a partner at Clyde & Co since 1985 and heads the firm's reinsurance team. An international insurance and reinsurance disputes specialist with over 30 years' experience, Nigel is considered by many to be one of the top insurance lawyers worldwide.He leads Clyde & Co’s Resilience and Climate Change Risk practice. He edited Clyde & Co's 2018/19 series of reports on the rising tide of Climate Change liability and duties of care and frequently writes and speaks on this topic. He is also actively involved in Insurance Development Forum, a public/private partnership seeking to optimize and extend the use of insurance and the industry's risk management capabilities to protect those most vulnerable to disasters. He edited two IDF papers on ways in which technology can help to bridge the protection gap. 

Ajay is the Director of Systemic Risk Assessment at the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA), an independent non-profit initiative hosted by the United Nations Foundation that aims to mainstream systemic risk assessment in policy and decision-making in response to current and future challenges. Ajay is responsible for the development and implementation of frameworks, tools and methods to help organisations and communities understand interacting, compounding and cascading risks. 

Ajay is also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College London, where he previously worked on climate change mitigation, the energy transition and associated physical and transition risks, using integrated assessment and energy system modelling. 

Alyssa Gilbert is the Director of Innovation at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment and the Director of Undaunted, Imperial College London's climate change innovation hub, run in partnership with the Royal Institution. Alyssa leads a team at the Grantham Institute and together with Enterprise colleagues from across the university they run several programmes to develop research, innovations and talent to nurture solutions to tackle the world's most pressing environmental challenges.

Hirotaka Hideshima is Counsellor on Global Strategy to President and the Board of Directors of the Norinchukin Bank from April 2021. In November 2022, he became a member of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). He has been involved in the development of the sector guidance for financial institutions, the getting started guidance, and the discussion paper on value chains.

Hirotaka Hideshima has worked for the Bank of Japan from April 1989 to March 2021. He has represented the Bank on the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) between August 2010 and September 2012, and then again between January 2018 and March 2019. He co-chaired the Definition of Capital Subgroup (when it developed the definition of regulatory capital for Basel III), and the Macroprudential Supervision Group (when it developed the G-SIB assessment framework). From July 2002 to July 2005, he was seconded to the BCBS Secretariat at the Bank for International Settlements. After dealing with Japan’s banking sector problems in the mid-1990s, he served on various working groups of the BCBS.

Professor Aled Jones is the inaugural Director of the Global Sustainability Institute (GSI) at Anglia Ruskin University. His work in climate finance has been recognised by the State of California and he has received a key to the city of North Little Rock, Arkansas. In 2018 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Institute & Faculty of Actuaries and currently chairs their Biodiversity Working Party. Aled’s research particularly focuses on the finance sector and government and how they will respond to the impacts of global resource trends and climate change. He was chair of the Capital Markets Climate Initiative (CMCI) on behalf of the UK Minister for Climate Change in the Department for Energy and Climate Change and a member of the UK-US Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food Resilience for the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office. He is a member of the Expert Panel for the HRH Prince of Wales’ Accounting for Sustainability (A4S). He was an invited author on Chapter 7 (international dimensions of risk) for the UK Government’s 3rd Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA3) which was published in 2021.

Dr. Maxine Nelson is a Senior Vice President at the GARP Risk Institute, GARP’s research and thought leadership arm, where she focusses on climate financial risk management. 

She has extensive experience in risk, capital and regulation gained from a wide-ranging variety of roles, including Global Head of Wholesale Risk Analytics and Head of Capital Planning at HSBC, significantly expanding counterparty credit risk management at the UK Financial Services Authority during the last financial crisis, leading the credit risk team at KPMG London, senior credit risk consultant at Oliver Wyman, and embedding operational risk analytics globally at National Australia Bank. Maxine has a degree in mechanical engineering and a PhD characterizing how best to apply probability theory to real world problems.

Jo Paisley is co-President of the GARP Risk Institute, the thought leadership arm of GARP. Set up in early 2018, the Institute works across all risk disciplines, with Jo’s focus to date on climate risk management and scenario analysis, stress testing and operational resilience.

Her career began at the Bank of England where she worked in a variety of roles across macroeconomics, statistics, supervision and risk. Her last role was as a Director of the Supervisory Risk Specialists Division within the Prudential Regulation Authority, where she was heavily involved in the design and execution of the UK’s first concurrent stress test in 2014. She left the Bank in 2015 and joined HSBC as their Global Head of Stress Testing. She has also worked as an independent stress testing consultant, advising firms on how to get the most value out of stress testing.

Julie is a Partner and Chief Scientist with Propeller. a venture capital and private equity firm in Boston, MA. Julie’s focus is investments in ocean climate solutions and climate tech, and commercializing technologies, by evaluating climate risk, in concert with strategies for climate resilience. Julie also works at cultivating initiatives and collaboration to collectively ensure a life-sustaining planet for our children.

Dr Nicola Ranger is Director of the Resilient Planet Finance Lab at the University of Oxford, Executive Director of the Oxford Martin Systemic Resilience Programme and leads the Resilience and Development Group of the Environmental Change Institute. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking of the Oxford Martin School and a co-Director of the UK Integrating Finance and Biodiversity Programme. 

Nicola brings 20 years' expertise in risk, analytics, economics, finance and fiscal policy as a practitioner and researcher across industry, government, IFIs and academia. She works with governments, Central Banks, regulators, financial institutions and international organisations to help align policy and finance with resilience and sustainability goals. She is currently a senior advisor to the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), a member of the UK’s Green Taxonomy Advisory Group and co-Chair of the Resilient Planet Data Hub, an international public-private partnership with the UN and Insurance Development Forum providing open data and analytics on climate and nature. Until recently she was a Visiting Academic at the Bank of England, a member of the European Commission’s High Level Expect Group on Sustainable Finance in Low and Middle Income Economies and a Director of the UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment. 

Nicola joined Oxford from the World Bank’s Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice, where she worked with financial institutions, Ministries of Finance, Central Banks and regional institutions to strengthen financial resilience and implement systems and processes to strengthen national and global resilience to shocks and crises. Prior to this, she held senior roles at the UK Department for International Development, the London School of Economics and Political Science, HM Treasury, Risk Management Solutions and Defra. Nicola completed her postdoctoral research in climate economics and policy at the London School of Economics 

Erica Sassu is the EMEA Climate & Environmental Risk Executive responsible for the integration of climate and environmental risk in the risk management framework as well as second line oversight of the Enterprise climate scenario analysis programme. 

As part of her role, she is as well responsible for the development and coordination of climate and environmental risk reporting used to ensure senior management oversight of climate and environmental risks impacting the bank.

Prior to this role she was the Legal Entity Executive of the Enterprise Scenario Planning and Execution team covering Stress Testing, Recovery and Resolution deliverables for international material entities. She managed a team based in Charlotte, Dublin and London.

She joined the Bank in September 2014 working in the International Stress Testing team. In January 2020 she has been promoted Managing Director as she took further responsibilities in the Enterprise Scenario Planning and Execution organization. 

Prior to Bank of America, she was a Senior Manager in EY London in the Quantitative Advisory Services practice. She gained experience in Financial Services on various areas including stress testing, credit risk modelling, model validation and OTC derivatives valuation.

She obtained an MSc in Quantitative Finance (La Sapienza University, Rome) in 2008, the GARP professional qualification as Financial Risk Manager in 2009 and the GARP Sustainability and Climate Risk Certificate in 2021.

Erica is an interdisciplinary academic and published author, currently working on a broad programme of research in the use and interpretation of mathematical models including the role of expert judgement.

Erica is an Associate Professor of Modelling for Decision Making at UCL’s Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy, where she works on a programme of research funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. Erica is also a Fellow of the London Mathematical Laboratory, where she leads the research programme on Inference from Models, and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Data Science Institute.

Nigel Topping was the UN Climate Change High-Level Champion from the COP26 Presidency, appointed by the UK Prime Minister in January 2020. Working alongside Chile’s High Level Champion for COP25 and Egypt’s High-Level Champion for COP27, Dr. Mahmoud Mohieldin, Mr Topping helped strengthen collaboration and drive action from businesses, investors, organisations, cities, and regions on climate change, and coordinate this work with governments and Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). He is the founder with Gonzalo Munoz of Ambition Loop, a global NGO based in Chile.

Mr Topping was CEO of We Mean Business, a coalition of businesses working to accelerate the transition to a zero carbon economy. Prior to that he was Executive Director of the CDP, following an 18 year career in the private sector, having worked across the world in emerging markets and manufacturing. He is currently Business Champion for the UK Government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) and a non-executive director of the UK Infrastructure Bank.

Howden is a leading global insurance intermediary group with employee ownership at its heart. Founded in 1994, it operates in 50 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, employing 16,000 people and handling $38bn of premium on behalf of clients.