Financial and economic issues underlie virtually every sustainable development decision that must be made over the coming years. The Future Earth Finance and Economics Knowledge-Action Network will focus on improving the understanding of sustainability through the lens of business, economic, and financial systems, and their inter-dependencies.
The aim of this urgent work is to inspire the emergence of sustainable development pathways that link economic prosperity with social justice and a healthy biosphere. There is growing interest from policy makers, financial practitioners, civil society, and researchers in systemic interventions that can help mobilize capital for the transition to sustainability.
Work done by the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and UN Environment Program (UNEP) Financial Inquiry lays the groundwork for this process.
Key Contacts
Sunhee Suk
Science Officer, Japan
Sunhee Suk
Science Officer, Japan
The Future Earth Finance and Economics Knowledge-Action Network will bring broad communities of researchers, practitioners and end-users together to explore ways to align global financial and economic systems, business models, consumption, and production patterns towards sustainability both conceptually and in practice.
This Knowledge-Action Network considers the financial and economic system as part of a larger complex socio-ecological system and its goal is to stimulate collaborative design processes that lead to new research proposals, engagement activities, and the emergence of research-based solutions. This will be done by mapping and scoping processes together using the Future Earth Open Network as well as convening leading thinkers and the growing community of innovators in the area of sustainable finance, business models, and economic systems.
Development Team
Masachika Suzuki
Co-Chair, Finance and Economics KAN Development Team
Full profile
Masachika Suzuki is a Professor at Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. The area of my research interests includes clean energy technology innovation and development, sustainable finance and banking, and sustainable tourism and community development. I received Ph.D. from Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam in the Netherlands and MAs both from Columbia University in the US and Keio University in Japan. Prior to this position, I was an Associate Professor at Kansai University (2010-2014) and an Assistant Professor (2007-2010) and Associate Dean at the Graduate School of International Management of International University of Japan. Apart from the academic career, I have work experience in the field of environmental and energy consultancy. The positions include senior analyst positions at Mitsubishi Securities in Tokyo and Innovest Strategic Value Advisors in New York as well as consultant positions at the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) at the UN headquarter in New York, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Bonn and UNU’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS) in Tokyo.
Paul Hudson
Co-Chair, Finance and Economics KAN Development Team
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Paul’s background is in environmental economics and statistical analysis. Paul currently works at the University of York's Department for Environment and Geography since September 2021. Paul works as an interdisciplinary researcher working on all aspects of flood risk management, with a focus on individual level actions and impacts using survey data, insurance, and nature based solutions as part of wider climate change adaptation efforts. Before joining the University of York, he completed his PhD on the use of insurance to boost flood resilience at the Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Potsdam.
Ajibola Akanji
Lead City University, Ibadan, Nigeria
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Ajibola Akanji is a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, and a member of the Nigerian Bar Association. He is a lecturer at the Faculty of Law, Lead City University, Ibadan, and holds degrees in Law and Public Administration. His research interest transcends the Social sciences and Law, it is focused on the intersection of Law, Co-operatives and Sustainable development. He emphasis the importance of co-operatives, cooperation, solidarity economics and social financing, and their possible upgrade with the mechanism of robust legal frameworks, which he advocates as an imperative to poverty alleviation and sustainable development. He is an adherent of the works of late Elinor Ostrom, and Guy Standing of the University of London. He made contributions on the impact of co-operatives and co-operative law to the business of agriculture in Nigeria to the World Bank Group 2019 Report on Enabling the Business of Agriculture. Aside teaching and research, he engages in private legal practice. He served as a trainer at the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) organized Global Youth Forum (GYF20), February, 2020 at Kuching, Malaysia, where he handled sessions on Co-operative Law. He is a Member of the Young Scholars Initiative, Institute for New Economic Thinking, where he serves as a Project Organizer with the Co-operative Working Group.
Andrea Roventini
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
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Andrea Roventini is full professor of economics at the Institute of Economics of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, and research fellow at OFCE, Sciences Po (France). He holds a PhD in Economics and Management from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. His main research interests include complex system analysis, agent-based computational economics, business cycles, economic growth and the study of the effects of monetary, fiscal, technology, innovation and climate-change policies. He is currently the principal investigator and consortium coordinator of the Horizon 2020 GROWINPRO project financed by the European Commission. He has been involved in the projects IMPRESSIONS, DOLFINS, and ISIGrowth financed by the European Commission. His works have been published in PNAS, Nature Climate Change, Industrial and Corporate Change, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Economic Modeling, Ecological Economics, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Economic Inquiry, Socio-Economic Review, Environmental Modeling and Software, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Macroeconomic Dynamics. He is editor of Industrial and Corporate Chance – Macro Economics and Development and advisory editor of the Journal of Evolutionary Economics.
Emily Ching-Cheng Chang
Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica
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Ching-Cheng Chang is a research fellow at the Institute of Economics in Academia Sinica and professor of Agricultural Economics in National Taiwan University, Taiwan. She holds a PhD degree in agricultural economics from Pennsylvania State University of the US. Her main research interests include the economic impact assessment of public policies on agricultural and rural development, climate change adaptation, and sustainable use of natural resources using partial and general equilibrium models. Since 2011, she has worked in several APEC projects on food emergency response mechanism, women’s economic empowerment with ICTs, and strengthening public-private-partnerships to reduce food losses and waste in food supply chains. During 2015-18, she was appointed as the Director of the Socio-Economic Department of APEC Research Center for Typhoon and Society. She has published nearly100 articles in refereed journals and currently is the associate deputy editor of Climatic Change. She is also the co-editor of Global Warming and the Asian Pacific (2003) and a few book chapters.
Fumiko Kasuga
Global Hub Director, Japan Hub
Full profile
Fumiko Kasuga, Ph.D. has been serving as Future Earth Global Hub Director – Japan since 2015. She is also Professor, Nagasaki University School of Tropical Medicine and Global Health/ Interfaculty Initiative in Planetary Health, and Deputy Director, Research Center for Global Risk, Nagasaki University. Fumiko was Vice-President of Science Council of Japan in charge of international activities, when she was engaged in establishing Future Earth global secretariat. Fumiko had worked as a government researcher in the field of public health, in particular on microbiological food safety in the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan until 2016, then was Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Environmental Studies and a Visiting Professor at The University of Tokyo, before joining Nagasaki University in 2023. Internationally she has worked with the World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for Foods.
Hocine Cherifi
University of Burgundy
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Hocine Cherifi is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Burgundy, Dijon, France since 1999. Prior to moving to Dijon, he held faculty positions in France at Rouen University and Jean Monnet University, in the field of Signal Processing and Mathematics respectively. He has held visiting positions at Yonsei, Korea, University of Western Australia, Australia, National Pingtung University, Taiwan, and Galatasaray University, Turkey. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble, France, and held a postdoctoral position at the Department of Statistics of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He has been working on Signal processing, Image processing, and Computer Vision with an emphasis on mathematics and statistics. During the last decade, his research interests moved to network science with a focus on societal challenges. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings papers and has edited 15 books and conference proceedings. He held leading positions in more than 15 international conferences and served in more than 100 program committees. He is the founder of one of the main annual events in network science “The International Conference on Complex Networks their Applications. He is also the Founding Editor in-Chief of the Applied Network Science journal. Currently, he serves in the Editorial Board of leading scientific journals such as Computational Social Networks, PLOS One, IEEE Access, Journal of Imaging, Complex Systems, Quality and Quantity, and Scientific Reports.
Jethro Zuwarimwe
Institute for Rural Development University of VENDA
Full profile
Dr Zuwarimwe is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute for Rural Development, School of Agriculture at the university of Venda whose duties entails teaching and learning, Research and publication and Community Engagement. His area of professional focus is Agriculture Transformation for Inclusive Green Growth, Sustainable Food Systems, Environmental Resource Economics, Regional Economic Integration Research and Institutional Economics. Dr. Zuwarimwe has more than 20 years working experience as a consultant, researcher, lecturer, civil servant and development worker in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia in areas around sustainable socio economic development. His goal is to be part of an international team of experts that will put together their wealth of academic and practical research experience to shape global sustainable development agenda and solutions.
Jurgen van der Heijden
AT Osborne
Full profile
Jurgen van der Heijden (PhD) works for AT Osborne, a Dutch consultancy. His work regards the integration of spatial development, climate adaptation, and energy transition. Integrating these results in extra benefits and less costs for both the planet and the economy. He looks at the business model behind this integration, and at financing this business. Also Jurgen looks at the governance of integrating activities. Often this governance takes place in a community, legally organized as a cooperative. He helped to establish dozens of cooperatives. As ancillary position, Jurgen is chairman of the Dutch Association of Care Cooperatives.
Koji Omachi
Citigroup
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Mr. Koji Omachi is Managing Director, Chair Japan Sustainability Campion and CO-head of Debt Capital Markets, Citigroup Global Markets Japan Inc. He is taking leadership role for the business in ESG/Sustainability Strategic Advisory role and debt origination. He started his professional career at Nomura Securities in 1990 and joined Citi in 2004, when it was under the name of Nikko Citigroup, a joint venture of Citigroup and Nikko Cordial Securuties, and the company was renamed to Citigroup Global Markets Japan Inc. in 2009. Over 30 years career as professional in financial world, Mr. Omachi has worked for investment banking business; including ESG/Sustainability strategic advisory, private banking, institutional sales for fixed income and alternative products, rate structuring, debt syndication and origination. He graduated University of Tohoku, BA of Engineering, in 1990 and Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh MBA in 1997.
Kristy Faccer
Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS)
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Kristy Faccer has spent the last two decades working as an advisor, researcher and practitioner in the fields of climate change and sustainability and is currently based at the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) in Canada. She has extensive international experience and has been invited to speak and participate in projects on nearly every continent and in the process, engage with and learn from leaders and innovators across all sectors of society. Kristy’s written work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, books and the popular media and covered topics from most recently, corporate sustainability and the green economy to climate resilience. She holds a Master’s degree from the University of Toronto and recently completed her PhD in management at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business. Her doctoral dissertation drew on framing and social movement theory to explain how attention to context and collaboration between unlikely allies can positively shape climate action within and beyond individual organizations.
Sarika Jalan
Indian Institute of Technology Indore India
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Sarika Jalan is a Professor in the Discipline of Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore. She obtained her PhD from Physical Research Laboratory Ahmedabad in with a specialization in nonlinear dynamics and complex systems. After the postdoctoral experience at MPI-MiS, MPI-PKS Germany and NUS Singapore joined ITT Indore in 2011. Dr. Jalan has authored over 85 publications in peer-reviewed journals. She has made fundamental contributions in nonlinear dynamics research through her discoveries of novel collective states such as cluster and explosive synchronization of coupled dynamics on networks. These are significant discoveries relating to the structural properties of networks with dynamical properties of coupled nonlinear units on networks. She is Editor of Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, and Advisory Editor of Chaos: An interdisciplinary journal of Nonlinear Science.
Toon Haer
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM)
Full profile
Toon Haer currently works as an assistant professor at the institute for environmental studies (IVM) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focusses on the dynamics of adaptation and vulnerability, integrating natural and behavioural processes in risk models across different scales. His research interests include (flood, wind, wildfire) risk and impact analyses, adaptation strategies, economics of adaptation, and applying agent-based models to capture complex risk dynamics. Toon has been a visiting researcher at the University of Maryland and the University of California in the United states. Toon holds a bachelor in Technology Management, a master in Energy and Environmental sciences, and a PhD on dynamic adaptation and risk dynamics.
Roger Cremades
Finance and Economics Development Team
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Dr. Roger Cremades is a complex systems scientist and heterodox global change economist integrating human-Earth interactions across systems and scales into modular quantitative tools, e.g. connecting drought risks in cities with land use at the river basin scale. Roger coordinated research and co-production projects above €1M, and published in top journal like PNAS, Nature Climate Change, and Nature Geoscience. Roger is elected member of the Council of the Complex Systems Society (2019-2022) and co-Chair of the Development Team of the Finance and Economics Knowledge-Action Network of Future Earth (2020-2022). Roger is known for applying complexity methods such as networks, cellular automata, or adaptive cycles, to problems usually explored with ideas of the XIX century, thus producing innovative work about socio-economic tipping points, the dynamics of social norms, the sustainability frontiers of cities, the economics of the water-energy-land nexus, and climate risk insurances, i.a.
Advisory Group
Gaurav Bagga
Standard Chartered
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Gaurav is currently Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) Singapore. He joined the Bank in 2009 and has held numerous key positions in Standard Chartered such as Chief Financial Officer of Cluster Markets (Vietnam, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Australia), Head of Performance Management Analytics Wholesale Banking, and Head Asset & Liability Management (ALM) Product Control.Prior to SCB, Gaurav was Engagement Manager with McKinsey & Company focusing on advisory for Banking & Insurance clients. Here he counseled Senior Executives/ Boards of local and multinational banks as they developed their growth strategies, acquired and divested businesses, entered new markets, revamped their organizations, and transformed entire businesses.Gaurav started his career with Dell Computers and has an MBA in Finance from the University of Texas and undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Iowa State University.
Himanshu Sharma
UNEP
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Himanshu Sharma is the Manager of the Green Fiscal Policy Network, a collaboration between the IMF, UNEP and GIZ on advancing country dialogue and knowledge on green fiscal policy reform. Before joining UNEP, he worked with CNRS France, the World Bank and the OECD on public policy issues at the intersection of economic policy, financial regulation and the environment. He holds a dual degree MPA from LSE and Sciences Po Paris and a MBA in International Business from BIMTECH.
Junya Tani
Senior Adviser
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Junya is a senior advisor to Future Earth, Tokyo Hub on a pro-bono basis applying his knowledge and experiences from his business career. After graduation from University of Tokyo (Bachelor of Laws), he worked for a several global financial institutions (Bank of Tokyo (currently MUFG), Citigroup, UBS, Credit Suisse, and DBS) for years. After retirement from the business, he has been engaged in various social activities including employment support for persons with mental and intellectual disabilities, education, and revitalization of local communities.In 2018, he together with Naoko Ishii and Institution for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) translated and introduced “Big World Small Planet” (by Johan Rockstrom and Mattias Klum) in Japan, which has opened his eyes to the clear and present crisis of the earth.
Maya Rebermark
Engagement Lead, Sweden Hub & Communications Director, Earth Commission
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Maya Rebermark joined Future Earth in 2021 as Communications Director for the Earth Commission where she leads the strategic development of communications and outreach efforts. The Earth Commission is an expert analysis to underpin the setting of Science-based Targets for a stable Earth system and is hosted by Future Earth. Maya also supports to Future Earth Swedish Global Hub with strategic communications engagement at international fora and with diverse partners. Prior to joining Future Earth Maya held the role of Director of Stakeholder Engagement at the Mistra Centre for Sustainable Markets (Misum) at Stockholm School of Economics. She spent several years at the Stockholm Resilience Centre where she led global communications and engagement efforts for international transdisciplinary coalitions including the EAT-Lancet Commission and the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP). Since 2020 Maya has also been an advisory member of the Future Earth Finance and Economics Knowledge-Action-Network (KAN). Maya has focused on sustainable transformations for much of her career and has worked for the Stockholm International Water Institute, multiple UN Agencies, Fairtrade Foundation and Guardian where she was one of the first members of the Guardian sustainability group. Maya has leadership training from the Oxford Saïd Business School, an MSc in Environmental Science and Decision-making from Södertörn University and is a graduate of the Stockholm Resilience Centre Planetary Boundaries MOOC. A dual British/Swedish national Maya speaks English, Swedish and a spattering of Italian.
Michael Roos
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
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Michael Roos is professor of macroeconomics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. His research interest covers a broad range of topics related to the analysis of complex systems and the transition of economies towards more sustainability. In particular, his research focuses on climate change and the transformation of the mobility system and the energy system. He has also a strong interest in philosophy of science and ethics and advocates more pluralism in economics. Michael has experience in local policy consulting and chairs the graduate program „Economics Policy Consulting“ at his university. He has ample experience in academic leadership. Before he came to the Ruhr University Bochum, he was a lecturer in economics at the University of East Anglia, UK. He holds a PhD in economics from the Technical Unversity Dortmund.
Peraphan Jittrapirom
Global Carbon Project
Full profile
Peraphan Jittrapirom (Dr tech.) is a senior research fellow in transport planning and System Dynamics (SD) methodology at Radboud University. He has a background in Civil Engineering (MEng University of Bristol, UK) and previously worked in leading engineer consultants in the UK (Mott MacDonald & Colin Buchanan) before obtained his Ph.D. in Sustainable Transport Planning from TU-Vienna. He is experienced in System Dynamics, adaptive planning, and participatory approaches. His current research is focusing on how a participatory approach in the Group Model Building (a qualitative modeling approach using SD toolkit) can support a transition toward a sustainable transport system. He is a visiting research fellow to the National Institute for Environmental Studies, where he is an executive director of the Global Carbon Project, Tsukuba office.
Thomas Walker
Concordia University
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Thomas Walker is a full professor of Finance at Concordia University. Prior to his academic career, Dr. Walker worked in the German consulting and industrial sector at such firms as Mercedes Benz, Utility Consultants International, and KPMG. His research interests are in sustainability & climate change, aviation, corporate governance, and risk management and he has published over sixty articles in these areas. In addition, Dr. Walker has published five books on sustainable financial systems, emerging risks, sustainable aviation, environmental policies, and sustainable real estate in the past two years. He previously served as Director/Co-Director of the David O’Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, as Laurentian Bank Professor in Integrated Risk Management, as Chair of the Finance Department, and as Associate Dean, Research, at Concordia University.
