LSE’s Global School of Sustainability has launched a new Initiative in Sustainable Finance, which will be led by Professor Amil Dasgupta of LSE Finance and Tom Gosling, Professor in Practice in the Financial Markets Group.
The Initiative launched with an event entitled Financing a Sustainable Future [watch video], including a keynote lecture from Dirk Jenter, Professor of Finance at LSE, on the paper Sustainable Investing: Evidence from the Field, which won the UN PRI Best Academic Paper award 2024.
An early focus of the Initiative in Sustainable Finance will be Blended Finance, the practice of deploying public or philanthropic capital to mobilise private capital; a critical tool in market development, scaling technologies and funding solutions to society’s challenges, such as financing the net zero transition or meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, especially in developing economies.
Announcing the Blended Finance Lab, Tom Gosling stated: "The time for reports concluding we need to scale blended finance has passed. Instead, we need to identify the very practical issues and constraints that have prevented it scaling to date and then work to overcome them. The Blended Finance Lab will be a highly action-oriented initiative which provides a point of collaboration for market participants wanting to contribute to getting more private finance to where it needs to go".
The Global School of Sustainability (GSoS) at LSE was founded this year to advance global efforts to "shape a brighter future for all that is sustainable, resilient, hopeful, prosperous and inclusive". The School is set to be a centre of expertise, solving complex global sustainability issues through social policy innovation, and will train the next generation of leaders.
A number of LSE Finance academics have delivered transformative findings in the field of Sustainable Finance in recent years, and the GSoS Initiative will further these efforts, underlining LSE's place at the heart of Sustainable Finance learning.