Nicola Ranger

Director and Senior Research Fellow, Global Finance Group, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford
Dr Nicola Ranger is the Director of the Global Finance and Economy Group at the ECI and of the Resilient Planet Finance Lab. She is also Executive Director of the Oxford Martin Systemic Resilience Initiative, co-Director of the UKRI Integrating Finance and Biodiversity Programme and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking of the Oxford Martin School.

Her research addresses the advancement of finance and policy to address critical societal challenges across climate, nature, food, water, economic development and human well-being. She brings two decades of experience working in senior roles across government, research, international financial institutions and the private sector, and holds multiple advisory roles, with substantial experience in working to drive change both locally and globally and deep technical expertise in data, risk, analytics, scenario analysis, environmental sciences, economics, policy and decision science.

In 2023, Dr Ranger founded the Global Finance and Economy Group in the ECI that acts as a hub for world-leading research at the intersection of finance, climate, nature and analytics in close collaboration with financial institutions, Central Banks and government. She is deeply involved in developing approaches to stress testing and scenario analysis for government, financial institutions and regulators, including working with the IMF, World Bank, NGFS and UK Climate Financial Risk Forum. She is particularly passionate about mobilising sustainable investment in Emerging and Developing Economies (EMDEs) and deeply involved in the development of taxonomies and frameworks to mobilise investment for a net-zero, nature-positive and resilient transition. She also works extensively on systemic resilience, including global systems for tracking, assessing and managing major systems-level crises, with an analytics, risk governance and finance lens. Her interdisciplinary research brings a strong quantitative risk analytics, economics and decision science lens on issues such as assessing systemic risks, measuring the impact of investments, mobilising finance for sustainability, green fiscal policy, sustainable finance, financial regulation and supervision, the role international financial institutions and designing global crisis risk financing mechanisms.

Nicola also holds several leadership and advisory roles beyond Oxford, including: a Senior Advisor for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Deputy Director, Secondment) on Sustainable Finance and Resilience; co-Chair of the Resilient Planet Data Hub with the High Level Climate Change Champions, the UN and the Insurance Development Forum; a member of the TRASE Advisory Group; a member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance in Low and Middle Income Economies; a member of the UK Green Taxonomy Advisory Group; an expert member of the UK Climate Financial Risk Forum working groups on Adaptation and Scenarios; a member of the Financial Systems Thinking Innovation Centre of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries; and a former Senior Advisor to the World Bank and Visiting Researcher at the Bank of England. Nicola holds a Senior Visiting Research Fellowship at the Grantham Research Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science and Cetex.

During her career, Nicola has been involved in founding and leading many significant global initiatives related to sustainable finance and systemic resilience, including the G20-V20 InsuResilience Global Partnership, the Global Shield Financing Facility, the Centre for Greening Finance and Investment and the Centre for Disaster Protection. Nicola joined the ECI from the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment where she was Director, Climate and Environmental Analytics, UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment, and Head of Sustainable Finance Research for Development in the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group. Prior to joining Oxford, Nicola held senior roles in the World Bank and DFID (now FCDO). In these roles, Nicola worked with financial institutions, Ministries of Finance, Central Banks, International Financial Institutions and regional institutions to strengthen fiscal and financial resilience to climate and other crises, strengthen financial sector development, mobilise finance for resilience and put in place local, national and international systems to strengthen resilience to shocks and crises. At DFID, she also worked to strengthen national early warning systems, shock-responsive systems and integrate climate adaptation and disaster risk management into national policy and investment. Nicola also has a professional background in insurance and catastrophe risk modelling and has been involved in establishing insurance-based mechanisms, contingent financing and regional risk pools protecting multiple countries.

Nicola began her career as a scientific advisor on climate mitigation and adaptation policy and researcher on the science, economics and policy of climate change. Nicola completed her postdoctoral research in climate economics and policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science and holds a doctorate in Atmospheric Physics from Imperial College London. In 2005/06, she was part of the HMT/Cabinet Office Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change team and has worked as a Scientific Advisor at Defra, HM Treasury and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. She has published extensively and contributed to major reports including two UK National Climate Change Risk Assessments, the first UNEP Emissions Gap Report, and reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.