Biography
David Nelson is one of the world’s leading experts in climate change policy and sustainability finance.
Mr Nelson built and ran the climate transition team at WTW, a multinational risk and investment management consulting firm. At WTW, Mr. Nelson helped develop and manage climate related financial products that accumulated over $13 billion of assets under management. These products include a unique and innovative climate transition index that quantifies the financial risk underpinning global financial investments. He also managed WTW's climate investment strategy and climate corporate strategy work, and led thought leadership programmes to build new tools to assess financial risks to countries and their national economies from climate related economic and energy transitions.
In 2021, Mr Nelson led the integration within WTW of a team from the think tank, Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), to expand and commercialize the financial mechanisms and analytical tools they had developed at CPI. Mr Nelson was the Executive Director and global research director at CPI, where over a period of more than 10 years he and his colleagues built the think tank to a team of well over 100 researchers operating from offices in Europe, North America, China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Africa. Prior to CPI, Mr Nelson led the energy, commodities, and utilities equity investment team at AllianceBernstein, where they had over $100 billion invested in equities in those sectors.
For almost fifteen years before that, Mr Nelson was a strategy consultant and an economics consultant, at firms including BCG and Arthur D Little, leading regional consulting practices focusing on energy and the environment. Mr Nelson has a BS in Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MBA from The Wharton School. He has worked on significant projects in over 60 countries. He currently resides in London.
