The world's leading universities join forces for fairer finance
Environment — di Valentina Neri
From Oxford to Yale, universities are getting to work studying sustainable finance and helping it grow, for the benefit of future generations.
The world's leading universities join forces for fairer finance
From Oxford to Yale, universities are getting to work studying sustainable finance and helping it grow, for the benefit of future generations.
Cambridge, Oxford, Yale. And then Stanford, Zurich, the London School of Economics, Berkeley. These are the most prestigious universities, the ones that draw the brightest minds from every corner of the globe into their lecture halls. And, as of just a few days ago, they have something else in common: they have pledged to do their part for sustainable finance.
What the university alliance for sustainable finance is
The official name is Grasfi, the Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investment, and its purpose is to make a concrete contribution to giving responsible finance the prominent role it deserves. Eighteen universities have joined, from Toronto to Beijing (the full list is published on the official website).
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"Each of these universities is working in various ways on research questions related to responsible finance and investment, and this is incredibly exciting. The opportunity, clearly, is to ensure that all these individual efforts lead to a result far greater than the simple sum of their parts," said Ben Caldecott, director of the Sustainable Finance Programme at the University of Oxford and co-chair of the organising committee.
Researchers already at work on the next steps
The alliance was formally founded last year, but was presented to the public on 5 March. Going forward, it will carry out a stable programme of academic collaborations, organising one conference per year.
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Ahead of the inaugural event, scheduled for September in Maastricht, a call for papers has already been launched to invite academics from around the world to contribute on a range of topics. To name a few: how to make sustainability an integral part of a business; the implications of climate change for companies and institutional investors; the prospects for impact investing and philanthropy; methods for putting Big Data, financial innovation and fintech at the service of sustainability.
The second conference is also already in the diary, to be held in September 2019 in Oxford. In general terms, the universities aim to range across North America, Europe and Asia, in order to bring together the greatest possible number of diverse opinions and experiences. Academic research, in the founders' intention, can help to make concrete theoretical and practical advances on this issue, which can then be placed at the service of governments, financial institutions and the general public. Finance that takes into account environmental, social and governance factors — they stress — is a fundamental prerequisite for achieving the targets set by the Paris Agreement on climate and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.