Oxford Sustainable Finance Summit
29 June 2026
Conference Agenda
Topics we will focus on include:
- Geopolitics, populism, and conflict
- The agentic economy and the future of financial decision-making
- Societal resilience and silicon boundaries
- Environmental deterrence and planetary security
- Transition finance and transition planning
- Investing in nature and adaptation at scale
- Public sector reform and public finance resilience
- Heat as an economic and financial risk
Conference Schedule
08:45 – 10:00
Breakfast session: Investing in Nature at Scale: the nature proposition gap and how to close it
This session runs alongside registration.
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?
Coming soon…
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 – 11:20
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?
Coming soon…
11:20 – 11:45
Keynote: Geopolitics, Conflict and the Future of Energy
South School
Two energy security crises and two bouts of energy-driven inflation inside a five-year window, the first triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the second by the 2026 Iran war, have shown in hard numbers what economies tethered to globally traded fossil fuels actually cost. Households have absorbed it in lower living standards, businesses in lost competitiveness, and the public finances in emergency support schemes, higher public sector wage settlements driven by inflation, and higher debt servicing costs. These shocks have fed populism. But they also look set to accelerate the energy transition. The keynote will explore these issues and what it could mean for geopolitics, capital allocation, regulation, and international cooperation in the years ahead.
Coming soon…
11:45 – 13:00
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?
Coming soon…
13:00 – 14:30
Lunch
Rhodes House gardens
14:30 – 15:45
Session III: Financing the Agentic Economy, Sustainably
South School
The agentic economy is arriving fast. Autonomous AI agents can plan, decide, transact, and spawn sub-agents to carry out tasks, including those that their principals may never have explicitly authorised. How might the agentic economy develop, and what are the implications for growth and productivity?
Further, autonomous agents themselves 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?
Coming soon…
15:45 – 16:30
Break
Rhodes House gardens
16:30 – 17:45
Closing debate: “The 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). This year the motion forces the room to confront whether the architecture of sustainable finance, built around human decision-making and twentieth-century institutions, can credibly govern an economy in which AI agents allocate capital, write contracts, and shape risk at scale.
Coming soon…
17:45 – 18:00
Closing remarks
Sheldonian Theatre
Chair: Emiliya Mychasuk, Climate Editor, FT
Proposition
Alex Barkawi, Founder and Director, Council on Economic Policies (CEP)
Nicolette Bartlett, Senior Advisor, CDP
Jakob Thomä, Co-founder & Research Director, Theia Finance Labs
Opposition
Kingsmill Bond, Energy Strategist, Ember Futures
Eldrid (Ellie) Herrington, Head of Academic Engagement, Centre for Climate Engagement, Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge
Anthony Hobley, Deputy Chair, Climate, Risk & Resilience, Howden Group
18:00 – 21:00
Drinks reception and dinner
Rhodes House gardens
Chair: Noah Lachs, Past President of the Oxford Union