Dave Jones

Dave Jones is Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center on Law, Energy and Environment (CLEE). Jones was Senior Director for Environmental Risk at The Nature Conservancy from January 2019 – June 2021 and a Distinguished Fellow with the ClimateWorks Foundation. At The Nature Conservancy, Jones led efforts to demonstrate successfully that insurance modeling is able to account for the risk reduction benefits of nature-based mitigation of risk and loss and that insurance losses and pricing can benefit from nature-based mitigation. Jones served as California’s Insurance Commissioner from 2011 through 2018. He founded and chaired the Sustainable Insurance Forum (SIF), an international network of insurance regulators developing climate risk regulatory best practices. Jones was the first US financial regulator to require disclosure of investments in fossil fuel assets due to concerns about climate change-related risk and the first to conduct climate risk scenario analysis of insurers’ investment portfolios. Jones has testified before Congress, state legislatures, the G-20 Financial Stability Board, and numerous regulatory agencies, about the need for financial regulators to address climate change and the risks it poses to the financial system. Jones is a graduate of DePauw University (B.A), Harvard Law School (J.D.), and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (MPP).