Kristiina Vares-Wartiovaara

Kristiina has over 20 years' experience in the finance industry. After heading the sustainability work at OP Asset Management for a year, she is currently focusing on the thematic ESG investment funds' management & development. Environmental themes like climate and sustainable water form the main focus of the funds. In 2019-2020 Kristiina has worked also on the advancement of the ESG data availability & standardization in the EU, - the initiative, which was started in Finland in 2019 and resulted in June 2020 in the joint European finance industry letter - "Call for EU action: a centralized register for environmental, social and governance (ESG) data in the EU". In 2017-2018 Kristiina worked for a Finnish start-up company Tracefi, which focused on sustainability reporting for finance industry.

Previously Kristiina worked as portfolio manager at Danske Bank and as an economist and analyst at Nordea – including setting up emerging markets research function within Merita Bank Markets department (now Nordea Bank). Kristiina is an independent thinker and commentator with multi-lingual presentation skills. She is also a PhD student at Hanken Business School (www.hanken.fi) in the field of sustainable finance. Her research aims at integrating environmental sciences into economics & finance: investigating how to best quantify environmental impacts as well as make government budget (case: Finland) more transparent in terms of ESG impacts.