Oxford Sustainable Finance Summit
29 June 2026
Conference Agenda
Topics we will focus on include:
- Investing in nature and adaptation at scale
- Societal resilience and silicon boundaries
- Environmental deterrence and planetary security
- Geopolitics, populism, and conflict
- The agentic economy and the future of financial decision-making
Whether sustainable finance is fit for purpose in the AI age
Conference Schedule
08:45 – 09:50
Breakfast session: Investing in Nature at Scale
This session runs alongside registration, and seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please arrive early to secure a seat.
Our field has built an extraordinary infrastructure of nature-related frameworks, targets, and reporting guidance, but it has not produced anything like enough investable nature and resilience propositions at a scale that institutional capital can actually back. We need to shift collective effort from producing more complexity to developing a pipeline of specific, place-based, nationally significant nature and resilience propositions around the world, each fully costed, each with a business case that can stand up in front of a finance ministry. How can we do this together? Who should lead the development and costing of a serious pipeline? What institutional vehicles can carry these propositions from concept to investment? And what is the role of governments, civil society, companies, and financial institutions in stress-testing and championing them?
Chair: Sophie Robinson-Tillet, Editor, Real Economy Progress
Speakers:
Martin Berg, Chief Executive Officer, Climate Asset Management
Tom Butterworth, Fellow and Director, UKIMEA Biodiversity and Environment Leader, Arup
Ben Caldecott, Founder and Director, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group and Associate Professor of Sustainable Finance, University of Oxford
Milo Sumner, Programmes Manager, RSPB
10:00 – 10:10
Opening Remarks
The development and disclosure of transition plans is increasing globally. The potential of transition plans as a strategic tool to unlock the volumes of finance required is becoming clearer. Recent recommendations and reports across jurisdictions, including Australia, the EU, France, Indonesia, Japan, and the UK, are recognising the power of planning to unlock finance and support growth. This session will explore examples of how transition planning is underpinning efforts to allocate and access finance and how these flows are supporting growth, competitiveness and climate policy goals. It is led by the International Transition Plan Network (ITPN), which brings together governments and regulators on key topics concerning private sector transition plans.
Chair: Kate Levick, Associate Director of Finance & Resilience, E3G
Richard Barker, Board Member, International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), IFRS
Sophie Brodie, Associate Director, Climate, Fidelity International
Jonathan Dunn, Head of Climate, AngloAmerican
Daisy Streatfeild, Sustainability Director, Ninety One
Irem Yerdelen, Deputy Chair, Transition Finance Council
10:10 – 11:25
Session I: Societal Resilience and Silicon Boundaries
East School
Societies, like ecosystems, have conditions they need to function: trust between people, working institutions, broad economic participation, a population healthy enough to engage in civic and economic life. The Silicon Boundaries framework seeks to identify the thresholds at which the scale or nature of AI and related technologies begins to erode these preconditions. The nine categories of silicon boundaries interact and reinforce one another in ways that can produce cascading instability. The categories are: information integrity, social cohesion, political stability, economic participation, physical and mental health, safety and security, financial stability, rights and consent, and environmental sustainability.
Unlike planetary boundaries, thresholds are not fixed. They move depending on governance choices: stronger regulation, better digital literacy, and robust institutions push boundaries outward; institutional weakness, regulatory failure, and technology designed to exploit vulnerabilities bring them closer. The same volume of computing power produces different boundary dynamics depending on how it is used.
The financial implications are direct. If society acts to stay within Silicon Boundaries, capital currently allocated to AI infrastructure may be significantly mispriced. The session will explore:
› Which Silicon Boundaries are most material for capital allocation, and how could they be measured?
› Which sectors, asset classes, and infrastructure categories are most exposed if societies move to stay within them?
› Is the Silicon Bubble thesis credible, and what would constitute the trigger for a repricing event?
› Which governance choices, regulatory, civic, and corporate, would push boundaries outward, and which would bring them closer?
› What is the role of investors, supervisors, and standard-setters in pricing these risks before they crystallise?
Chair: Jakob Thomä, Founder and CEO, Theia Finance Labs
Speakers:
Louise Dudley, Portfolio Manager, Federated Hermes
Laurie Fitzjohn-Sykes, Director, Investor AI Resource Hub
Shanu Mathew, Senior Vice President, Portfolio Manager/Analyst, US Sustainable Equity, Lazard Asset Management
Lise Pretorius, Chief Sustainability Analysis Officer, Matter
11:25 – 11:55
Morning break
Rhodes House gardens
11:55 – 13:10
Session II: Environmental Deterrence and Planetary Security
East School
Public finances are constrained and the environmental crisis is accelerating. Incentives and subsidies alone will not mobilise sufficient capital or change behaviour at the speed required. Targeted, proportionate enforcement, made credible by independent observation, could be cheaper, faster, and fairer for many environmental objectives.
The logic is borrowed from deterrence theory: you do not have to catch everyone to change outcomes. You need credible monitoring and visible follow-through so that the expected cost of violation exceeds the gain. Satellite-led analysis and AI have made this feasible at scale for the first time. In Brazil, satellite monitoring supports predictive enforcement against illegal logging. In New Mexico, earth-observation-enabled auditing has uncovered off-lease drilling on public land and generated significant enforcement revenue. These are not one-offs. They indicate a wider redesign of compliance that protects honest operators, rebuilds fiscal capacity, and delivers environmental outcomes. The session will explore:
› How will the deployment of monitoring-led enforcement reshape outcomes across different themes, sectors, and geographies, and where will the early effects be felt most strongly?
› What governance and political conditions are needed to make credible deterrence work, and how can it be designed to protect honest operators?
› How should financial institutions and insurers price the rising probability of detection and enforcement against polluters and illegal operators?
› What is the role of private capital in supporting the monitoring, verification, and analytical infrastructure that makes deterrence credible?
› How can a coalition of governments, supervisors, investors, and civil society move this from demonstration to standard practice?
Chair: Bernice Lee, Research Director, Futures, and Hoffmann Distinguished Fellow for Sustainability, Chatham House
Speakers:
Sarah Barker, Managing Director, Pollination Law
Christophe Christiaen, Head of Spatial Finance Initiative
Justin Mundy, Senior Adviser, NatureFinance and Chairman, Sustainable Sovereign Debt Hub
Mariana Botero Restrepo, Director of Organised Crime, Loom
13:10 – 14:30
Lunch
Rhodes House gardens
14:30 – 14:50
Keynote: Geopolitics, Conflict and the Future of Energy
South School
London Climate Action Week brings together governments, investors, regulators, and civil society from across the world for what has become the densest single week of strategic climate conversations outside the COPs. The keynote will distil what mattered most from the week, with a focus on the geopolitics of the energy transition and what shifting alliances, security concerns, and industrial strategy choices could mean for capital allocation.
Nick Mabey, Co-Founder and Director, E3G and Founder of London Climate Action Week
14:50 – 15:00
Primer on Agentic Finance
South School
The agentic economy is arriving fast. Autonomous AI agents, built on large language models and integrated through emerging protocols, can plan, decide, transact, and spawn sub-agents to carry out tasks across the financial system, including tasks their principals may never have explicitly authorised.
The first wave of deployment is already changing how capital is allocated, how financial services are accessed, and where the regulatory perimeter sits. The implications for the architecture of sustainable finance, much of which assumes human decision-making and twentieth-century institutions, are direct. The primer will introduce the topic, set out the most important developments to date and where the trajectory points next, and lay the foundations for the panel that follows.
Dr Ben Caldecott, Founder and Director, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group and Associate Professor of Sustainable Finance, University of Oxford
15:00 – 16:20
Session III: Financing the Agentic Economy, Sustainably
South School
Autonomous agents will increasingly participate in the financial system, shaping access to capital and financial services. The session will explore:
› How is the agentic economy likely to evolve over the next five to ten years, and what are the most plausible trajectories for its share of global economic activity?
› How quickly is agent-mediated capital allocation displacing human decision-making, and which segments of finance are most exposed first?
› What does the rise of agent-mediated decision-making mean for the existing sustainable finance architecture, and which parts of it are most exposed to becoming ineffective?
› What are the systemic risks of agent-to-agent financial relationships outside regulated infrastructure, where should the regulatory perimeter sit, and what does this mean for central banking and prudential supervision?
› How do we prevent agentic finance from becoming the route through which capital flows back into activities regulated markets are increasingly unwilling to fund?
Chair: Alex Money, Founder in Residence, Smith School, University of Oxford
Speakers:
Dr Julia Bingler, Research Associate in Financial Risk Data Analytics, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
Robert Eccles, Visiting Professor of Management Practice, Said Business School
Raoul Ruparel, Senior Director, Centre for Growth, Boston Consulting Group
Helen Thomas, Founder & CEO, Blonde Money
16:20 – 16:50
Afternoon break
Rhodes House gardens
16:50 – 18:00
Closing debate: “This House believes that sustainable finance is not fit for the age of AI.”
East School
The signature closing format of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Summit. Previous motions have addressed whether finance sector net zero pledges will have any positive impact on real economy decarbonisation (2022), whether 1.5 degrees is alive thanks to finance (2023), and whether the global ESG backlash is justified (2025).
Chair: Sophie Robinson-Tillet, Editor, Real Economy Progress
Proposition
Robert Eccles, Visiting Professor of Management Practice, Said Business School
Lise Pretorius, Chief Sustainability Analysis Officer, Matter
Opposition
Alex Money, Founder in Residence, Smith School, University of Oxford
Jakob Thomä, Founder and CEO, Theia Finance Labs
18:00 – 21:00
Drinks reception and dinner
Rhodes House gardens
Chair: Noah Lachs, Past President of the Oxford Union