Biography

Michael Grubb is a leading international expert on energy systems and policy responses to climate change, including the economics of energy innovation and systems transition, electricity markets, and climate policies and finance. His wide-ranging career has combined academic positions with and applied roles including the UK Climate Change Committee, the energy regulator Ofgem, and chairing the UK government panel of technical experts on Electricity Market Reform. At UCL, he is Director of new UCL Centre for Net Zero Market Design.

Recent research positions include the IPCC Sixth Assessment (Convening Lead Author, Chapter 1 Mitigation Report), leader of the Sustainability hub of the UK ESRC programme on Rebuilding Macroeconomics, and Strategic Director for the international programme on the Economics of Energy Innovation and Systems Transition.

Prof Grubb joined UCL in 2014 alongside his role at Ofgem, and in 2017 became a full-time Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the Institute of Sustainable Resources. Prior to these positions, he was Chief Economist at the Carbon Trust and part-time Senior Research Associate in Economics at Cambridge University, and Chair of the international research network/interface organisation Climate Strategies.

These conjoined appointments followed 10 years at Chatham House where he led the Energy and Environment programme. In 2000, he founded the Climate Policy journal and remained Editor-in-Chief until 2016. From 2008-11 Prof Grubb served on the UK Climate Change Committee, established under the UK Climate Change Act to advise the government on future carbon budgets and to report to Parliament on their implementation, and stepped down to take up his role at Ofgem advising on the transition of the UK electricity system.

Author of eight books, Prof Grubb's written contributions include more than sixty full journal research articles with 100 other works published in academic journals and major reports, alongside numerous other publications. The book Planetary Economics: energy, climate change and the Three Domains of Sustainable Development (Routledge 2014), brought together insights from 25 years of research and implementation of energy and climate policies and was awarded the 2021 Marcel Boiteux prize for “outstanding book contributing to energy economics and its literature” by the International Association for Energy Economics.

Biography

Irene Monasterolo is Full Professor of Climate Finance at Utrecht University’s School of Economics, where her research focuses on the impact of climate risks on fiscal and financial stability, and on the role of the financial system (policies, markets, financial instruments) in climate mitigation and adaptation.

Irene co-developed the climate stress test of the financial system, which introduced the first framework to translate climate scenarios into adjustment in financial valuation and risk metrics for investors, considering network effects.

Irene has also co-developed the EIRIN Stock-Flow Consistent macro-financial model to analyse the impacts of climate physical and transition risks, and of green policies in the low-carbon transition. Irene’s work has been published in top journals including Science and Nature Climate Change.

Irene has collaborated with leading financial institutions, including the World Bank, the European Central Bank, the European Stability Mechanism, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, on climate financial risk assessment. Irene is now collaborating with the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) to develop its short-term climate scenarios, and with the European Commission in the analysis of and solutions to the climate insurance protection gap in Europe. Irene is visiting professor at WU Wien; Associate editor at Ecological Economics; CEPR Climate change and the environment research fellow and member of the CEPR European Finance Architecture Research Policy Network; research fellow at the Institute Louis Bachelier and at SUERF.