Interview with Truzaar Dordi about Sustainable Financing
In this episode, I spoke with Truzaar Dordi, PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo studying sustainability management. The financial sector isn’t one we generally think about when thinking about sustainability. But when the top 5 banks in Canada doubled their investments in tar sands in 2017, clearly where we decide to put our money can certainly have an environmental impact. In our conversation, we talked about sustainable financing and what that means for us as Canadians, integrating environmental decisions with our financial systems, the financing needs we’ll need to have in place if we want to actually meet the latest UN Sustainable Development Goals, current issues, what consumers can do, and lots more. Enjoy!
Truzaar Dordi is a doctoral candidate in Sustainability Management at the School of Environment, Enterprise, and Development, at the University of Waterloo, working under the supervision of Dr. Olaf Weber. His research utilizes advances in computational modelling to investigate the intersection between climate risk and financial resiliency. His research draws from the fields of climate finance, stranded asset risk, and energy policy. Recently, Truzaar is interested in the systematic risk of rapid decarbonization on asset pricing and portfolio allocation.
Truzaar holds a Masters in Sustainability Management from the University of Waterloo where his research examined the burgeoning fossil-fuel divestment movement. Since, Truzaar has worked on sustainable capacity building for small and medium enterprise in the Waterloo region, stakeholder simulations of infrastructure projects like Canadian pipelines, the design of a national climate finance strategy, and on flood risk management. He has sat on the executive committees of Sustainable Youth Canada, Sierra Youth, Fossil Free UW, and the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics and is the director for Waterloo Sustainable Development Group’s (WSDG) Impact Investing Division. Truzaar is the recipient of the 2018 Energy Council of Canada Energy Policy Research Fellowship, awarded for his work on financial stability.