£4.5m GRANT FROM IKEA FOUNDATION TO BACK SUSTAINABLE FINANCE ACTION AT OXFORD

The IKEA Foundation has granted £4.5 million towards four Oxford University Sustainable Finance Group projects, which will make a significant contribution to aligning the global financial system with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

A video explains the grant.

In order to ensure finance flows into sustainable projects and industries – and deliver on the Paris goal of keeping global temperature rises to 1.5°C – financial institutions need to understand the risks and impacts of their investments and the implications for the bottom line.  

Dr Ben Caldecott, director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group, insists action is urgent and says, ‘We need to transform financial decision-making so that the capital and financial services needed to deliver global net zero by 2050 are actually provided. We have very little time left and that’s why we’re working on what we think could be transformative interventions.’

Liz McKeon, IKEA Foundation’s head of climate action, says, ‘We have less than 10 years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and temperature growth to 1.5°C and we cannot make it without interventions from and change within the finance sector.’

The funding will allow the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group to undertake four major projects which, combined, will help unlock genuine change:

• The Spatial Finance Initiative: Poor data availability and quality makes it difficult for the financial sector to measure and manage climate and environmental risks and externalities. SFI will publish consistent, comprehensive and accurate asset-level data for the most polluting sectors. This will aid transparency.
• The Public and Third Sector Academy for Sustainable Finance: Public sector and civil society organisations lack expertise and capacity in sustainable finance, which prevents them from designing effective policies, regulations and campaigns. The Academy will give governments, regulators, central banks, charities and philanthropists the knowledge, networks and skills to shift tens of trillions of dollars of capital away from unsustainable activities to those aligned with the Paris Agreement.
• Energy Transition Risk and Cost of Capital Project: To support the transition to net zero, the cost of capital for clean investments must come down while the cost of capital for polluting investments must increase. This project will track changes in the cost of capital for polluting companies and the factors which influence these changes.
• The Future of Engagement Project: While financial institutions are using engagement to attempt to deliver climate action, current strategies are not achieving the scale and pace of change needed. This project will develop, pilot and scale new and more impactful forms of financial institution engagement and stewardship.