Climate & Nature Risk Practitioner’s Month

Loubna is an Actuary with 20+ years’ experience in risk management. In the last six years, Loubna has been particularly focusing on the embedding of climate and sustainability-related risks and opportunities within Aviva’s governance, risk management and reporting frameworks. 

Loubna is a passionate about sustainability challenges. She has supported the PRA/FCA Climate Financial Risk Forum (CFRF) since its establishment in 2019. She also participates in several other industry leading forums with the objective to raise awareness, influence, support the transition to net zero and build best practice across the financial sector. 

Catherine is Impax’s Chief Strategy Officer. She is responsible for leading our business strategy, including corporate development activities and for leading the build of Impax/s digital strategy, inclusive of our data architecture and AI capability. With over 25 years of experience in sustainable development, finance, strategy and change management, she is also a highly respected leader in green finance.

Before joining Impax in 2021, Catherine spent five years at the UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, including acting as Director General, responsible for around 500 staff tasked with developing the UK’s Net Zero Strategy and International Climate and Energy policy. She also chaired the UK Government’s Climate and Energy G7 Presidency in 2022. Before this, she was Global Head of Environmental Sustainability at Australian financial services firm ANZ. She was also Chief Operating Officer at Low Carbon Australia and Head of International Development at the Carbon Trust.

Outside of Impax, Catherine is on the Board of the Met Office and is the Chair of its Remuneration Committee.   

Catherine holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the London School of Economics, a master’s degree in Environmental Science and Management from Oxford University and a bachelor’ degree (Hons 1st) in Chemical Engineering from The University of Queensland.

Dr Ajay Gambhir is Director, Systemic Risk Assessment, at ASRA (the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment, hosted by the UN Foundation). He leads on ASRA’s approach to assessing systemic risks, as well as identifying and curating supporting data, evidence and models. Ajay is also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, where he previously worked as a climate change and energy academic, leading a team on integrated assessment modelling of low-carbon development pathways.

Alex is responsible for offering bespoke Sustainable Finance solutions to the Bank and to its clients. Alex has been instrumental in the issuance of the Bank’s three Sustainability Bonds and in the Bank’s launch of the world-first sustainable money market deposit in 2019. Since then, he has led the rollout of ESG derivatives, ESG repos, sustainable savings accounts, sustainable trade finance, green mortgages and an NDC aligned climate loan. He is the Bank’s lead on frameworks (green, social and transition), taxonomies, and sustainable finance impact reporting. He also leads the Bank’s work on Adaptation & Resilience, and social finance.

As well as being a trustee of the Vision Catalyst Fund, Alex helped establish and now sits on the board of a social enterprise operating between London and Kenya that serves to empower young people through employment.

Jack is a director in Risk Advisory leading on stress testing and climate risk stress testing. Prior to joining Deloitte in February 2023, Jack spent 5 years as head of stress testing at the Bank of England, leading the concurrent stress testing programme of major UK banks. As well as leading the annual stress tests (ACS) used to set bank capital buffers and assess the resilience of banks and the system, Jack also led the exploratory stress testing programme, including the climate stress tests published in 2022. In total, Jack spent 22 years at the Bank of England advising policymakers on monetary and financial stability.

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.

Prof. Nicola Ranger is Executive Director, Earth Capital Nexus and Professor in Practice, Natural Capital, Risk and Finance at the London School of Economics. She previously served as 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. Nicola 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. 

She 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, HM Treasury, Risk Management Solutions and Defra. Nicola completed her postdoctoral research in climate economics and policy at the London School of Economics.

Billy is Head of Climate Risk for Barclays, a function created in 2020 to support Barclays’ ambition to become a net zero bank by 2050 and help accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.

He is responsible for developing Barclays’ climate risk methodologies (including scenario analysis) and managing climate risk in the bank’s portfolio globally. Billy is a member of the Barclays Group’ Sustainability Committee and sits on the investment committee of its Sustainable Impact Capital portfolio.

He has had the pleasure of chairing the Bank of England Climate Financial Risk Forum (CFRF) working group on financial resilience this year.

Sandy Trust is passionate about climate change and sustainability. His personal mission is to help re-connect finance and the economy to nature and the biosphere to deliver a future worth living in. 

Sandy sits on IFOA Council and is past Chair of the IFOA’s Sustainability Board. He leads the actuarial profession’s research with Earth System scientists on climate change and sustainability topics, recent papers include The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios and Climate Scorpion – the sting is in the tail. He advises a range of industry and policy climate initiatives on climate risk and net zero approaches.

He works in financial services with large investors to develop and implement their approaches to sustainability.

Claire Zhang specializes in climate risk management and regulatory compliance across U.S. and Europe at Barclays. Previously, she worked in quantitative modeling and stress testing, bringing deep expertise in applying analytical approaches to financial risks.

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 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.