I joined Heriot-Watt University in February 2024 as Professor of Sustainable Finance at Edinburgh Business School. I came to academia after a career in multilateral and international organizations including the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

My research and policy interests lie at the intersection of economics, finance, energy, geopolitics, and climate or environmental issues. I have published extensively on strategic investment funds and sovereign wealth funds, as well as on the public economics of the extractive industries, infrastructure finance, and development finance.  

My current interest and recent publications lie with climate and environmental aspects of these topics. Aside from research and policy publications, I regularly publish op-eds in media outlets such as the Financial Times, Project Syndicate, Foreign Affairs, and Le Monde, among others. My work has been covered by Bloomberg, the FT Sustainable Views, S&P Global, and Environmental Finance.

I earned my PhD at the University of Cambridge and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University.

My publications website: www.havardhalland.com

I am the policy lead for Edinburgh Business School's Centre for Financing a Sustainable Future. I supervise several PhD and DBA students, and am the course leader for M.Sc. courses in sustainable finance and in corporate governance and sustainability. I also teach on the undergraduate course in economic policy and on the Scottish Graduate Programme in Economics, hosted by Edinburgh University.

I supervise research students (PhD and DBA) in several areas related to sustainble finance, including environmental disclosure in the finance sector, impact of EU Carbon Border Adjustement Mechanism, and green hydrogen value chain. 

I retain an interest in the practices of institutional investors, in particular sovereign wealth funds, which I have previously published extensively on.

I have a growing interest in the implications of recent geoeconomic fragementation for financial markets, for firms, and in a geopolitical sense.