CGFI (The UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment)

The UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment (CGFI) was established in 2021 to advance the acceleration and use of climate and environmental data and analytics by financial institutions internationally and provide a platform for connecting science with finance and research with practice.   

CGFI has pioneered efforts to translate academic research into decision-useful data and analytics for industry and regulators. Supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the CGFI consortium was led by the University of Oxford in partnership with the University of Bristol, Imperial College London, University of Leeds, University of Reading, Alan Turing Institute and the Satellite Applications Catapult. The centre’s research has ranged across physical climate and transition risks and spatial finance, with an emphasis on engaging with practitioners on urgent and emerging challenges.  

During the CGFI project, development of the DAFNI Platform focused on onboarding project assets and widening platform accessibility. The goal was to curate a public collection of CGFI outputs that reflect the project’s achievements and provide a technical interface for engagement with policymakers. 

GGFI’s work on physical climate risks has resulted in new tools and approaches to address the financial risks that can arise from compound wind and floods; new models and datasets on tropical cyclone risks; and enduring collaborations on data challenges with insurers, via our Leeds Innovation Hub.  Their research on climate risks to infrastructure was instrumental in the creation of the Resilient Planet Data Hub, launched at COP28. The platform provides access to global, open risk data for financial use cases, and has supplemented CGFI’s capacity building work with central bankers and governments globally. 

CGFI has helped to nurture an ecosystem of climate and environmental data and analytics providers and played a pivotal role in fostering cross-sector collaboration.