Major universities join forces to promote sustainable finance

A new global alliance has been launched today to help scale-up the green finance sector.

18 major universities, including Cambridge, Oxford, Yale and Stanford, have joined the Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investment (GRASFI).

Although the Alliance was founded in 2017, it has waited until now to become a public entity with aims to promote sustainable finance on a global level.

It hopes that with the backing of some of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions, sustainable finance can become a major force.  

The University of California, Berkeley, Imperial College London, University of Zurich, the Frankfurt School of Finance, and the London School of Economics and Political Science are also members.

Ben Caldecott, who co-chairs the group, and is the Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme, told BusinessGreen that: "Each of these universities is working on sustainable finance and investment research questions in various ways and this is incredibly exciting. The opportunity is clearly in making all of these individual efforts greater than the sum of their parts."

Its new website also states that “high-quality, rigorous academic research can inform necessary developments in the theory and practice of sustainable finance and investment”

This will help “align the financial system will global environmental sustainability, a necessary condition for implementation of the Paris Climate Change Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals”.

The alliance will undertake a yearly programme of academic collaboration and organise an in-depth annual conference. These will take place across North America, Europe, and Asia to draw on as many different views as possible. Its inaugural conference is set to be held at Maastricht University in September.

The alliance closely follows a similar coalition from North American universities to work together on local climate change issues.

The full list of participant universities can be found here.

 

Photo Credit: Vadim Sherbakov