CACEIS partners with Oxford Smith School for programme on Climate & Nature Risks
CACEIS, a company that services the asset management industry, recently partnered with the Oxford Smith School for a two-day executive education programme for their clients on climate and nature risks. Held at the Blavatnik School of Government, the programme covered topics such as EU Environmental Policy, the ESG debate, and nature and biodiversity. Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science, gave a presentation on the very latest climate science and the trajectory of climate change.
CACEIS is the asset servicing banking group of Crédit Agricole dedicated to asset managers and institutional investors. The group holds €5.3 trillion in assets under custody and €3.4 trillion in assets under administration
“For many companies, nature risks go to the heart of their business models,” says Gordon L. Clark, Emeritus Professor and Senior Consultant at the Oxford Smith School, who led the programme. “It is either an input to production or it's the result of production. And increasingly, good quality nature is becoming more scarce and more expensive. Companies are very conscious of this issue for their businesses and how markets are responding to it. Investors are also becoming much more concerned with how eco-efficient company production processes are in terms of their use of nature, recycling, and sustainability. For these reasons, companies are eager to learn more about the natural world and how they can work with it in a sustainable way.”
James Parish, Business Development Manager at CACEIS, comments:
“Understanding nature and climate risks is extremely important to an organisation like CACEIS so we’re helping our clients better understand those risks while enhancing their governance. The origins of our organisation go right back to the roots of our shareholder, Crédit Agricole, a major French agricultural bank and for us, it's all about making sure that we serve the community and that society benefits from our activities. From our point of view, educational programmes like this really help us as an organisation to build closer bonds with our clients and enable them to deliver better results.”
Joe Saliba, Deputy CEO of CACEIS commented “The education partnership with the Smith School of Oxford demonstrates CACEIS’s continued commitment to provide exceptional thought leadership to our clients and guests alike. CACEIS remains committed to supporting ESG principles - and as we’re part of Crédit Agricole group, it is in our DNA.”
Dr Giovani Palafox-Alcantar, Head of Executive Education at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, is overseeing our growing array of custom programmes with global companies and NGOs.
“There is much more awareness now within organisations of the basics of sustainability,” says Dr Palafox-Alcantar. “Now it’s more about the implementation, and that’s when senior leaders need guidance and support that is more individually tailored to their company’s contexts and needs. We are seeing three times the amount of interest in our custom programmes compared to the previous two years.”
“Being a relatively small school puts us at an advantage,” adds Dr Palafox-Alcantar. “We are agile and can adapt and respond quickly to requests, while drawing on Oxford’s broader network of expert faculty, including some of our highly experienced emeritus Professors.”
“One of the reasons companies come to the Smith School at Oxford University is because they're looking for insights about problems that they already know well,” says Professor Clark. “They're not coming to be told about a problem they didn’t know about. They're looking for depth and scope about issues that are important to them. They're also looking to Oxford for authoritative and deeply informed insights, because they're already awash with information about, say, sustainability and biodiversity. They trust us to provide knowledge backed up by rigorous and globally recognised research.”
Mette Morsing, Director of the Oxford Smith School, Professor of Business Sustainability and Interim Dean of Said Business School, comments:
“Despite the geopolitical context we face, demand for custom business training in sustainability and nature remains strong, and we are partnering with the best in the world to deliver on that demand. We are at the cutting edge on some of the most important research on nature, including finance biology and community-based approaches and it is integral to many of our programmes. By putting nature at the forefront of our business education work we hope to broaden the agenda beyond terms like ESG and towards something altogether more holistic and impactful.”
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