 If I can have your attention please. Well, good morning. It is a huge pleasure to welcome you to the... We've worked out, it's the second CGFI annual forum here at OneGeorge Place. My name is Rowan Douglas, I'm director of the Insurance Development Forum and it's my pleasure to be your MC for today. First actually to send an apology, although we'll be hearing from him in person. I got a call on Friday saying could I stand in and be the MC because Ben is doing his duty out in Singapore and has been detained in Singapore. So very sadly couldn't actually make it here. Here he's, but Baroness Penn, he's doing great things to Britain out there in Asia Pacific and helping to agree that side of the world as well I'm sure. So we're going to be hearing from Ben in just a minute by video. But it's an incredible programme, I mean you've all seen it. I can say good morning to everyone here because it's actually just an in person event although all the sessions are going to be recorded so feel free to enjoy them at your leisure or pass on details. Some sessions will have some Q&As, we'll try and keep things as much to time as possible. We're going to have a few keynotes and then we'll be breaking into our first panel on Seabed in a little later on. With that, I'm going to say, I think we've got 300 people here today. People are becoming in all the time but let's get going. Can I say those magic words? Run VT, thank you. Hello and welcome to the CGFI annual forum 2023. My name is Ben Caldercott, I'm the director and principal investigator for CGFI and it's wonderful to welcome you to one great George Street for what looks like and I'm sure will be a very successful event. We've had over 400 people register, we have a wait list, we have wonderful speakers. You're in a fantastic venue and I'm sure it will be a great success. On my part, the only fine ointment is that I'm not able to be there with you and I'm really sorry to have to do this introduction virtually as a recording. But what I wanted to do in that brief introduction I have with you is to introduce you to CGFI to say a bit about the successes we've had over the last year and also to flag some of the things that we'll be doing in 2020, later in this year 2023 but also into 2024. You'll have the opportunity, of course, to speak with colleagues across CGFI, across the consortium. Many of our team are present in the room and you'll be able to talk to them at panels during the networking sessions and so on. So please do, if you're interested in anything that I mention now or anything else that's mentioned on the panels, please do seek out colleagues and they'll brief you and there'll be opportunities obviously also to reach out to us later. But let me start by saying a bit about CGFI, particularly for those that might be uninitiated, might be new to what we're trying to do. So CGFI was launched in 2021, we began at operations in April 2021, we've been set up to be the national centre to accelerate the adoption and use of climate and environmental regulation analysis by financial institutions globally. The origins of CGFI were the green finance strategy that came out in 2019. And one way to think of us is essentially you have one pillar within that strategy that's carried through, of course, which is on financing green and another pillar which is also carried through called greening finance. And in the strategy, the government announced that it was going to set up something called the Green Finance Institute to focus on financing green. And in many ways that's our sister institute and we're set up a bit earlier than us. And then we've been set up, funded by UK Research Council funding specifically for the National Environment Research Council, but also innovate UK to work on the greening finance piece. And that's really about bringing climate and environmental science right into financial decision making across the financial system, across different types of finance use case, across different types of financial institution. Where would we like to get to? What are we trying to achieve? Ultimately, it's very ambitious. We want to make sure that financial institutions can access climate and environmental data and analytics for any point on planet Earth. Historically, so they can access past data currently so they can access up to date data or even in near real time. And then data that goes out, projections that go out over time horizons that are relevant for a whole variety of different financial decisions. And we want this to be available for the whole range of material climate and environmental risks and externalities. And that is quite some to-do list. And we're doing this, trying to do this through a variety of different programs, projects, initiatives that you'll hear more about in partnership with financial institutions but also with policy makers, with supervisors, with civil society and with other. Other actors, including of course other researchers outside of the UK and across the wider UK too. What does success mean? Well, it means that individual financial institutions will be able to better measure and manage risks and externalities. It means they'll be able to integrate that into what they do and shift cap allocations accordingly. It means that individual financial institutions will be more resilient. It also means that the global financial system will be more resilient. And it also creates opportunities for innovation and commercialisation, particularly for London and the UK as a global financial centre. And that's something we will come back to and you'll hear more about throughout the day, our activity in innovation commercialisation. CGFI is a consortium centred on universities and you can see here the universities that are represented. The Reading Bristol Imperial leads different departments in each Oxford, which is where I'm based. But we also have other bits of the research community in the UK as part of CGFI. The Science and Technologies Facilities Council, for example. The Alan Turing Institute, which is the national laboratory for machine learning and AI. And the satellite applications catapult that's focused on commercialising opportunities from space based technologies. And then we have a whole variety of partners that integrate in different ways across the consortium. Many of you, of course, are here today. So thank you for all the work that you do and the support that you provide and the input that you're putting into making us fulfil the objectives of the mission that we have together. This just shows you how we're organised. What I really wanted here for you to focus on the columns, the three core research themes on physical risk, transition risk and also nature risk. And I should say risk and externalities as well and impact. It's not just about risk. And you can see that under each theme, we have a variety of projects and programmes. These are all at different stages. They're all different sizes. They have different leads. But the idea is that they're connected, interconnected. They're benefiting from the scale, the capabilities we can provide as a national centre. And are supported by these cross-cutting activities. And again, you'll hear more about these from colleagues. So I won't go into too much more detail here. Now in terms of some highlights for you. So the first I wanted to mention is around flood risk analysis. The risk posed by heavy rain and strong wind is suspected to be exacerbated by the way they co-occur. Yet this remains insufficiently understood to effectively plan and mitigate. So we have a team of CGFI researchers at Bristol and Reading, as well as other partners who are developing a new flood severity index, as well as examining correlations between wind and flooding in Europe and the UK in relation to extreme weather events. This work is visualised here and you can see on the slide. It's all on the website, on our website. And you can see the correlations between wind, precipitation, river flow and so on. So that's one example of a set of outputs from CGFI over the last year. Another example is a team of CGFI colleagues of Imperial developing a new open global tropical cyclone hazard model. This is available for past and present time frames, different scenarios and seasonal forecasts. And this is going to be published soon through our global resilience index tools. And you're going to hear more about GRRI just a second, because that's the next slide, but also from colleagues that have been working on this very important initiative that was launched in Glasgow at COP26, but over the last two years has progressed very significantly. So this is a global resilience index initiative. There are a variety of tools again available through the CGFI platform and some examples of use cases for climate stress testing, disaster risk financing, infrastructure investment, as well as climate related financial risk disclosures. And the idea behind GRRI is to provide open globally consistent climate risk data for governments and financial institutions. And that's a hugely important thing to do. And you'll hear more about GRRI throughout the day. Another thing we wanted to mention, I wanted to mention was the work we've been doing with the Bank of England. And this essentially is reviewing, assessing the impact of the sea bears, the climate binary exploratory scenario exercise on participating financial institutions. So what can we learn from that climate stress test? And how can that inform future stress tests? So, again, a team from a drawing capabilities across the consortium has produced this work and you can see the publications. Again, all of this is online and available to review. Another thing we've been very involved with, so we co-lead the Secretariat for something called the Transition Plan Task Force. This is a globally significant initiative defining what gold standard transition plans can and should look like. Transition plans, transition planning are going to be incredibly important going forward, not only for risk management, but also for understanding how companies and financial institutions can actually support the transition in the different jurisdictions in which they operate. So we've had a busy year, we're finalising a disclosure framework, we're finalising sector neutral guidance as well as sector specific guidance. There's a sandbox. There are working groups now on nature, on just transition, on adaptation. And the team is doing a significant amount of international engagement. A lot of our conclusions are now emerging in guidelines and recommendations from processes like the international sustainability standards for the ISSP. So if you're interested about the TPT, please do engage with some of the colleagues today who are working on this and you'll hear more about the TPT on the next first session. Spatial finance, so this is the integration of geospatial data and analytics into financial theory and practice. This is something we've been working on for a long time free CGFI, but CGFI has enabled us to accelerate the work that we do on spatial finance. We've been expanding the coverage of different open publicly available asset level data sets. So these are for specific sectors where we seek to characterize and identify the owners of different assets. So you can do asset level bottom up geospatial analysis of what are the risks, what are the externalities at an asset level and you can aggregate that up to the company level and then to the portfolio level. So a lot of work creating these consistent asset level data sets. You can download them online. A lot of these data sets are ingested by data providers as well. So you might be accessing it through those distribution channels. We've also launched regional data sets. So these are initial kind of pilot data sets. So we've done that for beef processing, petrochemicals, pulp and paper, waste management. And we've also published an updated review of states and trends in spatial finance. And we're continuing our work to expand expand the coverage both in terms of geographies specific sectors, but also for other other sectors. Innovation. So we've had a big year you can see here some of the things that we have announced the partnerships that we have. The prizes that we have and the networking events that we've we've organised. Part of our mandate is to stimulate innovation in producing the next generation of robust green finance analytics. And that part of that has been supporting projects funded by Innovate UK through their SARAF program. And those are going to be showcased as part of the forum today. We've also been bringing together different parts of the ecosystem through networking events at our two innovation hubs, one in Leeds, one in London. We've been stimulating new product and service ideas through the climate investment challenge data analysis prize, as well as the aforementioned transition plan task force sandbox that I mentioned just before. And we've also developed a partnership with the European Space Agency to try and attract more funding into this area. So a lot going on and a real testament to the team, the growing team. So we've been busy filling posts recruiting expanding developing new funding relationships to underpin those positions and trying to build a national centre that can endure and provide the capabilities that the wider sector requires. In terms of the kind of future work. You can see here, just some some highlights. There's going to be guidance on high impact, low likelihood events, and that throws up some particular challenges for financial institutions in terms of pricing those sorts of risks and measuring them. We're going to be producing guidance on quantifying and interpreting uncertainty, which is in many ways the name of the game. There'll be more work on measuring physical risk, particularly a case study looking at pension funds and real estate portfolios. We're doing a lot of work looking at asset level data sets in UK agriculture. So the results of that and the data sets associated with that are going to be becoming available. So for those of you that are working on agriculture. And the idea is that we might be able to extend that work to other jurisdictions. We're developing methods for assessing the data quality associated with emissions. And as many of you will know that that data quality can be incredibly patchy and inconsistent. So how can we assess data quality. And then there's a growing body of work. And I'm sure this is reflected in the room. More work on nature, nature related dependencies and impacts and associated metrics and colleagues will be ramping up our innovation ecosystem work. So an ever growing program of networking events and hackathons and master classes and also an internship program as well. So we have a really exciting agenda. They're going to be a few more opening remarks. So you're going to hear from Baroness Penn, the Lord's Treasury Minister shortly. And you're also going to hear from Merck Ian Williams from Merck and then we will pivot to the first session on transition plans and transition planning. And again, all of this is going to draw on work we've been doing across the CGFI consortium. There'll be a session on stress testing and scenario planning, incredibly current and very important for driving behaviours across the financial system. And I don't, you know, I for one think that that stress test will be, you know, the sea bears won't be the only climate stress test. I suspect there'll be other other ones coming down the track to see how market participants are actually integrating these things and working on them to hear about that will then have a lunch. You then have David Craig, who's giving the keynote on nature-related financial risks and opportunities. David's the co-chair of the TNFD. There'll be another session after that focused on nature. And then we have a session focused on combating wind flood risks. There are also parallel sessions in the Godfrey Mitchell Theatre. You have an innovative UK innovation showcase at 230 and then a Merck research showcase at 415. So a lot going on. And I'm really gutted that I'm not going to be there. But before I hand over to Rowan. Firstly, I want to thank Rowan for agreeing to be the master of ceremonies and for being, I suppose, one of the fathers or grandfathers of CGFI. Rowan had played a critical role in getting CGFI up and running and served as our advisory council. So thank you, Rowan, for being the MC. I also wanted to thank the team, the wider team. The whole consortium has been involved in organising today and contributing to the different sessions and designing the sessions. Thank you for that. And then specifically, a few members of the team have been very involved in organising today and have made it all happen. So firstly, Alex Jackman. Thank you, Alex. Alex Horgan. So thank you. Alex, number two. First off, Jen, who heads our Spatial Finance initiative and also plays a really important role in the innovation work has been instrumental today and also our centre manager, Jimena Alvarez. So thank you in particular to you for all the hard work you've done. So with that, I will hand over to Rowan and thank you. I must say I don't think there's anyone who could have done such a fluent, comprehensive sort of sync presentation from a hotel room somewhere in Singapore over the weekend. I'm sure we'll all convey our thanks to Ben. It's such a great shame he can't be in here today. But I mean he touched on the challenge that we are all working together in this collective endeavour. How do we get physics properly into finance? How do we properly marry human and physical geography with economics? How do we ensure that the city of London and the world financial system is as comfortable looking and working through maps as we're looking at spreadsheets and other outputs? What we're doing is really hard, but ultimately it's to retrain the invisible hand to make sure we take account of the things that matter and shape the flows. And I think we'll all feel we're in great hands.