RI People & Appointments, January 14: Chicago Treasurer Summers takes US SIF board seat

City of Chicago Treasurer Kurt Summers has been named to the board at US SIF: The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment, the US membership body. Other new members are Kimberly Gluck, Managing Director and Member, Boston Trust Board of Directors and Aniket Shah, Head of Sustainable Investing at OppenheimerFunds. Leslie Samuelrich, President at Green Century Capital Management, was elected to a second term.
Nina Roth has started as Director – Responsible Investment at BMO Global Asset Management (EMEA), the former F&C Investments. She left German development agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), where she was Senior Advisor Sustainable Finance, in October last year, before which she worked as Environmental & Social Risk Manager (Director) at UBS and ESG Risk Manager (Vice President) at Deutsche Bank.
Philippe Desfossés has been replaced by Gerald Cartigny as Vice Chair of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC). Cartigny, who is CIO of $150bn Dutch pension administration organisation and institutional asset manager MN, takes up the role after Desfossés stepped down having departed as CEO of France’s public sector fund, ERAFP. Vicki Bakhshi, Director, Governance & Sustainable Investing at BMO Global Asset Management, has also stepped down from the IIGCC board, and Tom Murley – Chairman and Senior Advisor, HgCapital Renewable Partners Funds – left his role as non-executive board member last year.
Nadine Viel Lamare, the former Head Sustainable Value Creation at Sweden’s Första AP-fonden (AP1), has started her own consultancy called Good4Business.
Rory Sullivan has been appointed as a Visiting Professor in Practice at the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. Link 

Gordon Brown is to advise $78bn Swiss private equity firm Partners Group on its impact investments, media reports have confirmed. The former UK prime minister will join the advisory council of the firm’s $1bn impact fund, PG Life, which launched last year with a focus on SDG-focused investments, including in healthcare and eliminating poverty. Sitting alongside Brown on the council will be former UN General Assembly president Yuk Jeremić and Partners’ co-founder Urs Wietlisbach.

Elisabeth Bourqui unexpectedly resigned from CalPERS just seven months after moving to the US from Zurich to start as Chief Operating Investment Officer (COIO). Bourqui, who is on the board at Vontobel, was formerly Head of Pension Assets and Liabilities Management at ABB Group, before which she worked as an investment consultant for Mercer in Canada. A search for a new COIO has been launched, with Dan Bienvenue, the pension fund’s managing investment director, global equity, acting as interim COIO.

Han Dieperink has left his role as chief investment officer at Dutch bank Rabobank, according to reports.

Felix Dodds, Senior Fellow at the Global Research Institute and a Senior Affiliate at the Water Institute at University of North Carolina and an Associate Fellow at the Tellus Institute, has put himself forward to take the vacant post of Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme. Dodds is a critic of former UNEP head Erik Solheim who quit in an expenses scandal.Osmosis Investment Management, a specialist sustainable investor, has hired Lennart Hermans, previously a Senior Technical Officer at the Carbon Disclosure Project. Hermans, who reports to CEO Ben Dear, was the asset manager’s seventh hire of 2018.
Former California Insurance Commissioner and climate finance champion Dave Jones is officially “seeking new opportunities”. Jones led the Commission’s work on climate risk, disclosure and scenario analysis for insurance companies, despite threats of legal action from counterparts in other US states, but stepped down this month having served eight years and the maximum number of terms. He is replaced by Democrat Ricardo Lara. Jones has not announced his next step, but updated his LinkedIn profile to say he was “seeking new opportunities”, listing his specialisms as “insurance, land use, housing, climate risk, labour, healthcare, civil justice and the environment”.
Nicholas Pfaff has been promoted at the International Capital Markets Association. The Association’s long-standing point person for green bonds and member of the European Commission’s Technical Expert Group on Sustainable Finance, Pfaff is the Secretary to both the Green Bond Principles and the Global Green Finance Council, both hosted by ICMA. Formerly a Senior Director and Head of ICMA’s Paris Office, he has been promoted to Managing Director.
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim resigned to join Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) as partner and vice chairman. Kim will make the move in February, more than three years before his second five-year term with the bank was scheduled to end, following clashes with the Trump administration over climate change and development resources. World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva will act as interim president while a new leader is found.

Danish asset manager PKA has grabbed Maersk Drilling’s Jesper Steen as Head of Energy for its energy fund, SustainSolutions, in a bid to boost its renewable energy investments. At Maersk Drilling, a Danish oil and gas rig operator, Steen was Business Development Director. Christian Niepoort, CEO of SustainSolutions, said Steen’s appointment would “generate solid investments and secure massive CO2 savings” for the fund.

Marc Siegel has joined the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) to chair its Resource Transformation sector. Siegel joined EY in September 2018 after serving two terms as a member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). Before joining FASB, he was Director of Research at the Center for Financial Research & Analysis (CFRA), a firm later acquired by RiskMetrics Group which is now part of MSCI. Siegel addressed the role of FASB in sustainability reporting and spoke about it in an interview with RI.

A Corporate Governance Director is being sought by British Telecom, with part of the role “supporting on liaison with investors and proxy agencies”.

The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership is seeking a Marketing Manager.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) is recruiting a Corporate Governance Committee Member.