James Gifford’s life changed when he hopped aboard a flight from Sydney in 2003. The team he joined in Geneva framed the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment, created the concept of ‘ESG’ and changed the world. For James Gifford, the jump from building push-email programmes for Australian climate activists and sitting in Geneva framing the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) was surprisingly short.

These days, Gifford is head of sustainable & impact advisory and thought leadership at Credit Suisse in Zurich. But rewind to 2003, and you find a driven and ideological twenty-something academic with time on his hands before he kicks off a five-year economics PhD at the University of Sydney.

Instead of killing that time with leisure, he wrote to the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI). “I said I would love to do an internship, and that I had some ideas I’d like to contribute.”

They responded with a ‘sure, fine with us’, and so a few days later he pitched up in Geneva and got to work as an unpaid intern.

It changed his life - and in so many ways, ours too.

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