GARP 2026 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.

David Bailey is Executive Director for Prudential Policy, responsible for the development, negotiation and implementation of prudential policy that supports the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA)'s objectives and broader financial stability. David also represents the PRA on the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision.

David joined the Bank of England in 2014 as Director of Financial Market Infrastructure and has held roles as Executive Director of Authorisations, RegTech and International Supervision, and Executive Director of Financial Markets Infrastructure. His most recent role was Executive Director of UK Deposit Takers Supervision which he held under February 2024.

Prior to working at the Bank, David was Head of Markets Infrastructure and Policy at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and at its predecessor, the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

He graduated from Durham University and began his career at J.P. Morgan.

Hannah is Chief Operating Officer at B4NZ and has over a decade of experience with the Big4 leading major transformation programmes and for the last 5 years has worked with executive leadership teams and boards, advising on ESG and sustainability strategy.

Hannah has worked with major cross sector organisations, focussing on climate change and risk management. In doing this Hannah has been compelled to work with market coalitions and initiatives which define the future ecosystem where finance can flow with ease and organisations demonstrating the right sustainable behaviours are financially rewarded.

The challenges of facilitating the flow of capital to the real economy and working across innovative market solutions is what lead Hannah to join B4NZ.

J. Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems Science at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford. He is also External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Chief Scientist at Macrocosm.

His current research is in economics, including agent-based modeling, financial instability and technological progress. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to UBS in 2006. His past research includes complex systems, dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology. His book, Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World, was published in 2024.

During the 1980s he was an Oppenheimer Fellow and the founder of the Complex Systems Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While a graduate student in the 1970s he built the first wearable digital computer, which was successfully used to predict the game of roulette.

Emma Howard Boyd has had a distinguished career focused on environmental issues and sustainable finance. She served as Chair of the Environment Agency for England from 2016 to 2022 and was an ex officio board member of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs during the same period. Appointed by the Mayor of London, Emma chaired the London Climate Resilience Review, publishing a full set of recommendations in July 2024 to help the city prepare for the increasing impacts of climate change such as extreme heat, flooding, droughts, wildfires, sea level rise and storms.

Currently, Emma chairs ClientEarth's Group Board and ClimateArc, and is a co-Chair of Climate Resilience for All. She is a member of the Supervisory Board of the European Climate Foundation and a Visiting Professor in Practice, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Emma was the UK Commissioner to the Global Commission on Adaptation from 2018 until its sunset in January 2021.

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.

Laurie Laybourn is executive director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative (SCRI), a think-do tank that helps develop capabilities for securing a better world even as the environmental crisis escalates. He is an associate fellow at Chatham House, a visiting fellow at the Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). He is a trustee of the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and sits on the board of the Economic Change Unit, an organisation he founded. Previously, he was Director of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change and has worked at the LSE, Oxford University, and the UK Parliament. Laurie regularly appears on television, radio, and in print.

David Stainforth is a Professorial Research Fellow in the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics, and an Honorary Professor in the Physics Department at the University of Warwick. He pursues research on climate science and its relationship with climate economics and policy. He focuses particularly on uncertainty analysis and on how academic assessments can better support societal and business decisions related to climate change.

David has a BA in Physics from Oxford University, an MSc in “Energy Systems and Environmental Management” from Glasgow Caledonian University, and a DPhil in “Uncertainty and Confidence in Predictions of Climate Change” again from Oxford University. He co-founded and was chief scientist of climateprediction.net - a large, citizen-science computing project designed to explore the consequences of model error in complex climate models. He has published on a diverse range of subjects including climate modelling and model interpretation, climate physics, nonlinear dynamical systems, the philosophy of climate science, climate economics, hydrology, geomorphology etc.

His book, “Predicting Our Climate Future: What we know, what we don’t know and what we can’t know”, is published by OUP.

Rhian-Mari Thomas is CEO of the Green Finance Institute, an organisation at the forefront of shaping how finance can be used to facilitate real economy transition. 

Rhian previously spent 20 years in investment banking and corporate finance and was the first person to be awarded an OBE for services to green banking. She is a former member of the Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and is Senior Advisor to the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), having co-chaired its launch. 

Rhian serves as a trustee of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) UK, and advisor to the carbon credit ratings agency, BeZero Carbon. She also serves on several working groups and advisory boards for the UK Government, Welsh Senedd and the World Economic Forum. 

A fluent Welsh speaker, Rhian holds a PhD in Physics from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.