Professor Jessica Dempsey joins GSoS and CETEx
The Global School of Sustainability at LSE (GSoS) and its research centre the Centre for Economic Transition Expertise (CETEx) are delighted to welcome Professor Jessica Dempsey as an LSE Visiting Professor.
Professor Dempsey is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where her work sits at the intersection of environmental politics, financial governance and the structural drivers of ecological crisis.
Her interdisciplinary scholarship, combining feminist political economy, economic geography, political ecology and green finance, aligns closely with CETEx’s Nature Programme and its broader mission to understand how economic and financial institutions must evolve to enable meaningful ecological and economic transition.
Her central preoccupation is a question that sits at the heart of the biodiversity challenge: why does species and habitat loss persist and indeed accelerate despite the dramatic proliferation of international conservation commitments, national legislation and policy frameworks over recent decades?
Her book, Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics, recognised with the James M. Blaut Outstanding Publication Award, traces how biodiversity conservation has increasingly been drawn into market and financial logics, while critically examining the structural limits of these approaches. Her more recent and ongoing research extends this analysis to the architecture of the international financial system itself, asking how sovereign debt dynamics, development finance flows and investment pressures constrain the ability of governments, particularly in the Global South, to pursue biodiversity-aligned policies. This work, including the major collaborative report Exporting Extinction: How the International Financial System Constrains Biodiverse Futures, identifies the international financial system as a structural barrier on meaningful biodiversity action, and explores alternatives including debt justice and new forms of public finance.
Jessica’s research has been closely integrated with global policy processes. She has contributed to the work of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) as a lead author, and has engaged with central banks and financial regulators through the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS). She has served as the sole academic expert on the Advisory Committee on Resource Mobilisation under the Convention on Biological Diversity, bringing her analytical lens directly to bear on multilateral biodiversity finance negotiations. She holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia.
Elena Almeida, CETEx Head of Nature, said: “This has been a long time coming, and I am so excited to welcome Professor Jessica Dempsey as a Visiting Professor to CETEx.
"Professor Dempsey’s research addresses one of the most critical and underexplored dimensions of the biodiversity crisis: how the structure of the global financial system, including sovereign debt, investment pressures, development finance, actively constrains governments’ ability to effectively act in service of nature and justice for the people who depend on it. That systemic lens will bring real depth to CETEx’s Nature Programme, and I look forward to collaborating with her as we advance research and policy engagement at the frontier of nature-related financial risks and the political economy of transition.”
Commenting on her appointment, Professor Dempsey said: “I am thrilled to be formally associated with CETEx and the Global School of Sustainability at LSE. I look forward to immersing myself in CETEx’s exceptional community of researchers and experts working across disciplines to address some of the defining environmental and economic challenges of our time. I am excited to learn from colleagues across the Centre, develop new collaborations, and contribute to research that helps advance the transition to more just and sustainable economies.”