Research profile: Keith MacMaster

Keith MacMaster is a legal and financial policy researcher who examines the role of finance and investment on the impacts of environmental and social damage, particularly focusing on climate change and human rights/indigenous harms for extractive and ocean-based industries. His research on sustainable finance is directed at two broad areas. The first aims at improving responsible investing and creating new sustainable financial products. The second area analyzes the financial mechanisms relating to deep seabed mining, ensuring parties responsible for environmental damage have liability attached. The goals and outcomes of his research should stimulate the creation of new financial and legal mechanisms to fund sustainable projects, such as new types of green bonds and products based on the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Keith is currently engaged in collaborative research to develop an online climate data portal. This data portal will allow for increased public access to financial and climate-related information and should assist investors and financiers to develop new financial products. Future research will continue transnational and interdisciplinary studies and incorporate financial models to create new investment products that attempt to update theories of the cost of capital and risk.

Keith is also engaged in investigating, analyzing and providing recommendations for environmentally and socially responsible financing of deep seabed mining. This research will offer solutions regarding the role of capital and insurance to prevent, mitigate and remediate environmental and indigenous rights harms that result from deep seabed mining.