Nigel served as the United Nations’ High-Level Climate Action Champion for COP26, hosted by the U.K. in Glasgow in 2021. Nigel was appointed to the position in January 2020 by then U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and held the role until the completion of COP27 in November 2022.

The role of Climate Action Champion was created in 2015 as part of the Paris Agreement and aims to connect governments and the private sector to mobilize a stronger response to climate change. Nigel was responsible for delivering action from businesses, investors, organizations, and cities on climate goals and coordinating these towards the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

“Markets can and will play a key role in directing capital towards the mitigation of climate change,” Nigel Topping explains. “I am excited to be joining IBA at a time when it increasingly turns its focus to delivering solutions to support more predictability that bring scale to environmental markets.”

Before his time with the United Nations, Nigel was the CEO of We Mean Business, where he drove collaboration for climate action among non-governmental organisations working with global businesses. The coalition played a key role in businesses supporting the Paris Agreement. He was also part of the management team at the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) from 2007-2014, an international non-profit organization that helps companies and cities disclose their environmental impact with a goal to make environmental reporting and risk management a business norm.

“Nigel has spent decades building organizations, coalitions and collaborative systems to support the business community as it progresses towards meeting decarbonization goals,” said Clive de Ruig, President of IBA. “Nigel brings valuable knowledge, skills and experience to our Board as we deploy our governance and technology expertise to support ICE’s customers and markets in responding effectively to the challenges inherent in achieving climate goals.”

IBA is one of the world’s most experienced administrators of regulated benchmarks. Last year it launched the ICE Carbon Reference Data Service (ICE CRED) to facilitate the management of carbon credits across the trade lifecycle.

Designed to help reduce operational risk and cost, and deliver scalability, ICE CRED gives buyers and sellers of carbon credits enhanced reference data to manage their carbon credit trading processes. The reference data service assigns a unique ICE Carbon Credit Reference Identifier (ICE CREF) to carbon credits for each project and vintage, providing a universal reference code to facilitate their use.

If you’re interested in using ICE CRED, please visit https://www.ice.com/marketdata/reports/285 or contact [email protected] and read our ICE CRED FAQs.