Esther Whieldon is a Senior Writer on the S&P Global Sustainable1 Thought Leadership Team and co-host of the S&P Global podcast ESG Insider.  Full Bio

Esther Whieldon is a Senior Writer on the S&P Global Sustainable1 Thought Leadership Team and co-host of the S&P Global podcast ESG Insider. Esther has worked at S&P Global for 14 years and was previously a Senior Reporter in the S&P Global Market Intelligence newsroom where she wrote about climate change, ESG and energy issues. Prior, Esther worked two years as a reporter at Politico and spent several years before that in the S&P Global Platts energy newsroom in Washington, D.C. Esther earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Washington Adventist University in Takoma Park, Maryland. Minimize

James is Head of Data Strategy & Operations at Trucost, part of S&P Global. Full Bio

James is Head of Data Strategy & Operations at Trucost, part of S&P Global.

James manages Trucost’s data team, with responsibility for maintaining and developing Trucost’s intellectual property for use by Financial Institution and Corporate clients. He is also part of Trucost’s senior management team.

He has been the lead analyst and project manager for hundreds of projects that have provided multinational corporations and investment organizations with actionable insights to help meet their sustainability objectives. Previously, James served as Head of North American research at Trucost. Areas of expertise include the quantification of environmental impacts in investment portfolios across asset classes, assessing greenhouse gas emissions and water use in company supply chains and value chains, valuing environmental risks and natural capital dependencies, and integration of environmental performance information into business and investment decision making to reduce risk and generate financial benefits.

Prior to joining Trucost, James worked as a consultant at Ceres (the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies). James holds a Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford University’s Centre of the Environment, where his work focused on the measurement of corporate environmental performance and how these data are used within financial markets.  He also holds a BA and an MA in Environmental Science and Policy from Clark University. Minimize

Kai Chan is a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. Full Bio

Kai Chan is a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. Kai is an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented sustainability scientist, trained in ecology, policy, and ethics from Princeton and Stanford Universities.

He strives to understand how social-ecological systems can be transformed to be both better and wilder. Kai leads CHANS lab (Connecting Human and Natural Systems), and is co-founder of CoSphere (a Community of Small-Planet Heroes). He is a UBC Killam Research Fellow; a member of Canada’s Clean16 and Clean50 for 2020; a Leopold Leadership Program fellow; senior fellow of the Global Young Academy and of the Environmental Leadership Program; a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists; Lead Editor of the new British Ecological Society journal People and Nature; a coordinating lead author for the IPBES Global Assessment; and (in 2012) the Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Minimize

Gita Rao is a Senior Lecturer in Finance, and Associate Faculty Director of the Master of Finance program at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Full Bio

Gita Rao is a Senior Lecturer in Finance, and Associate Faculty Director of the Master of Finance program at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She joined the MIT Sloan finance faculty after over two decades of experience in global investing, asset allocation, risk management, and client service. She has managed the first global ESG portfolio in the United States, developed and teaches a course on impact investing at MIT Sloan, and is faculty director for the MIT Sloan Impact Investing Initiative.

Ms. Rao has been a portfolio manager responsible for over $15 billion in assets and director of quantitative equity research at two major investment firms: MFS Investment Management and Wellington Management Company, both in Boston. Prior to managing portfolios, she was a senior research analyst at Fidelity Management & Research Company and vice president at Kidder, Peabody & Co. in New York. She has published in the Review of Accounting Studies and appeared in media including Foreign Affairs, Bloomberg and CNN among others.

Dr. Rao has been a president of the Society of Quantitative Analysts, on the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal, on the board of trustees of the Research Foundation of the CFA Institute, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Minimize