Caroline Flammer Receives Inaugural Prize for Research on Green Finance 

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SIPA’s Caroline Flammer has been named as an inaugural recipient of the Insight Investment–University of Oxford Greening Finance Prize. A professor of international and public affairs and of climate, Flammer was honored for research that “helps society better understand how environmental change influences finance and investment, and how economic and financial systems can contribute to achieving global environmental sustainability.” 

The announcement came today at the Oxford Sustainable Finance Summit, a major annual gathering of researchers and experts working on green finance. The newly established award, officials said, is “the preeminent prize in an increasingly important area of research and practice.”

The award recognizes individuals and not-for-profit research teams in two categories, research and service. Winners share a prize of up to £50,000 (about USD $65,000) as well as a research residency and an invitation to give a public lecture at Oxford.

“This prize is designed to recognize and reward world-class academics who provide the rigorous financial market analysis needed into the effects of environmental factors on investment solutions,” said Abdallah Nauphal, CEO of Insight Investment, the asset management firm that provided endowment funding to support the prize in perpetuity.

“Congratulations to Caroline Flammer for forging the way forward through her outstanding contribution to research in green finance,” he added. “Caroline’s work provides evidence for investment decisions and to support claims being made. We look forward to her lecture later this year and would also like to thank the University of Oxford team for organizing the prize.” 

The judging panel praised Flammer’s research for its rigor and impact on the field of sustainable investment on topics including the impact of corporate green bonds, CSR [corporate social responsibility] and financial performance, and shareholder responses to sustainability; in particular they cited its “wide impact on sustainable investment and ESG,” or environmental, social, and corporate governance. Highlighted articles appeared in the academic journals Management Science, the Academy of Management Journal, the Strategic Management Journal, and the Journal of Financial Economics.

“I am deeply humbled and honored for being awarded this prize recognizing my contributions to research,” said Flammer, who is also the director of SIPA’s Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI), the chair of the UN Principles for Responsible Investment’s Academic Network Advisory Committee, and president of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability. “I look forward to continuing advancing scholarship as well as education and dialogue on system-level investing to drive progress in tackling climate change, biodiversity loss, social inequality, and meeting the other UN Sustainable Development Goals.”

Mary Schapiro, a former chair of the US Securities and Exchange Comission who is now vice chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, received the prize in the service category for her “leadership… in establishing the new global architecture for sustainability reporting.” Schapiro led the development of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, which are the two fundamental pillars of the International Sustainability Standards Board.