Nick Robins is co-director of the UNEP Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Financial System, a two-year initiative to advance financial policy options that more effectively mobilise capital for an inclusive, green economy. Nick Robins has over 20 years’ experience in the policy, research and financial dimensions of sustainable development. Before joining UNEP, he was Head of the Climate Change Centre of Excellence at HSBC in London from 2007 to 2014, where he produced investment research on issues such as clean technology growth, climate vulnerability, green stimulus and stranded assets.
In the Thomson Extel awards for European investment research, Nick was ranked as #1 analyst for integrated climate change in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2013. Prior to HSBC, Nick was first head of SRI research and then head of SRI funds at Henderson Global Investors. At Henderson, he published the first ever carbon audit of an investment fund and co-designed the Industries of the Future fund. Nick has also worked for the International Institute of Environment and Development, the European Commission’s Environment Directorate and was part of the original Business Council for Sustainable Development working on the Changing Course book for the 1992 Earth Summit. Nick has also acted as an adviser to BT, Carbon Tracker, Climate Bonds Initiative, GE, the UK’s Independent Commission for Aid Impact, WHEB Asset Management and the World Bank.
Nick has authored and edited a broad spectrum of books and reports on sustainable development, starting with his 1990 volume Managing the Environment: the Greening of European Business (translated as L’imperatif ecologique, Calmann-Levy, 1992) to his 2008 Sustainable Investing: the Art of Long-Term Performance (co-edited with Cary Krosinsky). In addition, he published The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (Pluto, 2006).