Eva Cairns

Eva is Head of Responsible Investment at Scottish Widows, responsible for leading the responsible investing strategy for one of UK’s largest asset owners, embedding it into the investments proposition and leading efforts to engage and shape best practice across the industry. She joined Scottish Widows from abrdn where she was the Head of Sustainability Insights and Climate Strategy, responsible for leading abrdn’s Sustainability Insights team to deliver research and views across key sustainability themes, including climate change, nature and social issues. She led abrdn’s climate strategy for Investments and has published a number of climate related papers including on net zero investing, climate scenario analysis, climate policy, the credibility of net zero targets and the just transition.

Eva has been actively involved in collaborative industry initiatives to drive forward best practice in responsible investing and advocate for a policy environment that enables investing in line with sustainability goals. Before focusing entirely on responsible investing in 2018, Eva led Investments related change projects and managed a team of Business Analysts to improve investment and risk management processes. Eva joined abrdn (previously Standard Life Investments) in 2010 from Halcrow Group (now CH2M Hill), a global engineering consultancy, where she worked as an Economist focused on environmental and socio-economic impact assessment of energy and transport projects globally. Eva graduated with an MSc in Economics with Distinction from the University of Edinburgh where her dissertation focused on the social cost of carbon. She also obtained the Professional Risk Management (PRM) certification in 2014.