Dr Nicola Ranger

Biography

Dr Nicola Ranger leads the Resilience and International Development Programme of the Environmental Change Institute. She is also Executive Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Systemic Resilience and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking of the Oxford Martin School.

Her research addresses the measurement, valuing and integration of resilience and environmental sustainability risks, impacts and goals within decision making, and the alignment of policy and finance with sustainable, resilient and inclusive growth. Her research covers climate, nature, resilience, adaptation and the SDGs with a strong finance, macro and public policy lens. She works with governments, Central Banks, regulators, financial institutions and international organisations to provide data, analytics and evidence to inform policies, finance and investment at all scales to build resilience and positively advance sustainability and inclusive development. She works predominantly in UK/Europe and emerging and developing economies.

Her research is interdisciplinary with a focus on quantitative research covering risk, analytics, decision science and economics. She works on a wide range of issues at the intersection of sustainability, policy, risk and finance, from assessing systemic risks, to measuring the impact of investments, to mobilising finance for sustainability and resilience, fiscal policy, sustainable finance, financial regulation and supervision, the role international financial institutions and designing global crisis risk financing mechanisms.

Ranger holds multiple advisory roles, including as a Senior Advisor for the World Bank, a member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance in Low and Middle Income Economies, an Academic Visitor at the Bank of England, a member of the UK Green Taxonomy Advisory Group, and a member of the Financial Systems Thinking Innovation Centre of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. Nicola also holds a Senior Visiting Research Fellowship at the Grantham Research Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Ranger bring 20 years' experience in risk, analytics, modelling, decision science, economics and finance as a practitioner and researcher across industry, government, IFIs and academia. She 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 in 2021, Ranger held senior roles in the World Bank and DFID (now FCDO). In these roles, Ranger 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. Ranger 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.

Ranger began her career as a scientific adviser 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 Adviser 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.