Sir Roger Gifford
Chair

In September 2017, the government asked leading finance expert and former Lord Mayor of the City of London, Sir Roger Gifford, to chair an independent taskforce to accelerate growth of green finance and the UK’s low carbon economy.

The Green Finance Taskforce report sets out a series of recommendations on how the government and the private sector can work together to make green finance an integral part of our financial services sector. The government has subsequently published the Green Finance Strategy which takes forward the key themes of the taskforce.

Sir Roger Gifford is a Senior Banker at SEB in London. He read Chemistry at Oxford University and began his career in the financial sector at S.G. Warburg & Co, joining SEB in 1982. Prior to his appointment as UK Country Head (2000 – 2016) Roger headed the bank's operations in Japan for six years. He has worked in and around the primary debt and equity capital markets most of his career. 

Roger is Vice Chairman and past Chair of the Association of Foreign Banks (AFB) in London and Chair of the Advisory Board of the International Business and Diplomatic Exchange (IBDE). He was Chair of the London Green Finance Initiative launched in 2016 to further the contribution of the financial sector to the G20 climate agenda and chaired the UK Government’s Green Finance Taskforce in 2018. Roger is also Chairman of the Green Finance Institute, launched in 2019, which has the economics, risk and commercial opportunity of meeting the challenge of climate change as its main focus.