I have spent thirty-five years working in the joins between disciplines, e.g. law, science, finance, industry, philanthropy and policy, on the problems where capital, regulation, technology and risk all need to align before anything moves.
My career has had several distinct chapters. I trained as a transactional lawyer focused on environmental issues and spent nearly two decades in private practice, advising on mergers, project finance, real estate and the carbon markets, including the biggest sale of land since Henry VIII sold off the monasteries as part of the privatisation of the UK’s coal industry, and the reorganisation and divestment programme by chemical company ICI. At Baker McKenzie I led the legal team in the consortium that advised the European Commission on the design of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme registries system and drafted the EU Registries Regulation, the legal infrastructure that underpinned the world’s first multi-national and still the largest cap-and-trade carbon market. While there I was also part of the legal team that developed the standard carbon-markets contracts for both carbon-project offtakes and trading. I went on to build and lead the climate change practice at Norton Rose Fulbright as Equity Partner and Global Head, where I was described in the legal directories as “an ambassador for carbon markets.” Between these I was General Counsel and a voting member of the Investment Committee at Climate Change Capital, where we raised and invested a €1bn carbon fund.
I then spent five years as the first CEO of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, where the “carbon bubble” and stranded-assets analysis helped reframe how trillions of dollars of institutional capital think about fossil fuel risk. Two parts of that work helped begin efforts to rewire the financial system as part of international efforts to green it. The first was being instrumental in persuading the Bank of England, and the then Governor, Mark Carney, to champion the case for climate-related financial disclosure that became, through the Financial Stability Board, the TCFD framework. The second was building the analytically driven foundations on which the major institutional investor networks now base their climate shareholder engagement: a key step from values-based to risk-based climate stewardship.
I joined the World Economic Forum as an Executive Fellow to launch the Mission Possible Partnership, the coalition of more than 400 companies across the seven so-called “hard-to-abate” sectors representing roughly 30% of global emissions. While at the Forum I also led the team running the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders, the largest CEO-led climate coalition, and its parallel community of climate leaders from the major NGOs and international organisations working on climate, business and finance. I helped to set up and support the First Movers Coalition, a partnership between the Forum and Secretary John Kerry’s team at the US State Department under the Biden Presidency. I went on to architect the Giving to Amplify Earth Action initiative (GAEA), the Forum’s public-private-philanthropic partnership model designed to mobilise a greater percentage of philanthropy into climate and nature by demonstrating how it could enable the $3 trillion a year required for net zero and nature recovery. GAEA was launched at the Annual Meeting in Davos 2023 with more than forty-five committed partners. Most recently I co-built the Climate Risk and Resilience platform at Howden as its Deputy Chair, where we developed and delivered a documented commercial methodology for converting institutional impact-driven thought leadership and multilateral engagement into multi-line brokerage and reinsurance revenue.
Different chapters, but the same underlying work in each. The pattern is to identify where a market needs to exist but doesn’t yet, build the institutional, commercial and intellectual scaffolding required to close that gap, mobilise the coalitions that give it momentum, and deliver returns measured both in capital flows and in transition impact. The second enables the first, and neither works alone. Aligning profit with impact to create wealth worth having.
A consistent theme across that work is that impact is not a constraint on commercial success. When designed correctly, it becomes the mechanism that enables it: expanding markets, unlocking new client segments, creating revenue pools that would not otherwise exist. This is not a slogan. It is the architecture of every market I have helped to build, from the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and carbon-project mechanisms in the early 2000s to the Enabling Insurance Breakthrough at Howden in 2025.
The bedrock under all of it is unusual and probably worth flagging. I trained as a scientist, First-Class degree in Chemistry and Physics, postgraduate research at Cambridge, before complementing the iterative, systematic, objective process of the scientific method with the cognitive legal process that prioritises logical analysis, issue spotting, and emotionless assessment of facts against the law. I am a qualified solicitor of England and Wales of more than thirty years’ standing. I have closed real commercial transactions, sat on real Investment Committees, raised real money, and built real organisations. The systems-change work is grounded both in the science and in how commercial reality actually works, not in how it should work. That combination, scientific analytical foundations, regulatory and legal fluency, transactional experience, executive delivery, and the convening authority to operate credibly across private, public and civil society sectors, whether with UN leadership, national finance ministries, COP presidencies, philanthropic principals, NGO leaders or Fortune 500 CEOs, is rare.
The current preoccupation, reflected across the writing on this site, is the missing translation layer between the probabilistic risk analytics that the insurance industry has built over three centuries and the language of mainstream financial valuation. With all the climate and nature data the world now has, our alphabet soup of initiatives such as IPCC, TCFD, TNFD, CDP, ESG frameworks, the thousands of investment decisions made every day by CFOs, investment committees, asset managers and finance ministries are still made as if that data does not exist. The gap is not data. The gap is translation: the data is not reaching decision-makers in a decision-relevant form, in the one language they actually use, which is money. Closing that gap is the work I expect to spend a substantial part of the next phase on.
I am now building toward that next phase on three concurrent tracks: founding leadership of new initiatives at the frontier of climate, nature and finance; selective paid strategic advisory; and non-executive director and trustee positions on commercial boards and substantive foundations where the combination of governance experience, board judgement, commercial transaction background and subject-matter authority is materially additive. I am open to conversations on any of these.
