Peter Tufano

Peter Tufano is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and Senior Advisor to the Harvard Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. From 2011 to 2021, he served as the Peter Moores Dean at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. From 1989 to 2011, he was a Professor at HBS, where he oversaw the school’s tenure and promotion processes, campus planning, and university relations and was the founding co-chair of the Harvard i-lab.

Tufano’s current work focuses on business solutions to climate change, in particular the role of climate finance and climate alliances, as well as the financial impact of climate change on households.

Tufano’s climate finance agenda builds on his decades of work on financial innovation, financial engineering, and financial institutions.   In 2023, he assembled leading scholars in climate finance to launch Financial Economics of Climate and Sustainability (FECS) to train the next generation of climate scholars.  In 2024, this virtual doctoral reading group drew students from over 130 universities globally, with 24 hours of material delivered by the core faculty and enhancement activities at the local schools.  See climatefinancephd.org.  Tufano’s research and case writing examine how risk engineering, return engineering, and financial collaborations are at the core of climate finance.  His current work on risk engineering studies the critical role of the insurance sector as well as advance purchase commitments.  Tufano sits on climate-related advisory groups in investment management, data services, insurance, and law.

Tufano’s work on climate alliances is informed by his personal experiences in creating and sustaining alliances—particularly in the educational space. At Oxford, he championed Business Schools for Climate Leadership bringing together eight business schools in Europe to support businesses addressing the climate crisis facing the planet.  (This group has now broadened to include clusters in Africa as well as the Middle East.)  His FECS course, described above, is another example of applying collaborative models to move climate education forward.  Tufano’s research in this space, with researchers from Harvard, Oxford and IMD, looks at the theories of change and potential benefits of alliances, potential anti-trust implications of climate alliances, recommendations for disclosure practices, and a forthcoming empirical study of the potential positive and negative impact of alliances.  His case-writing examines a few different types of alliances, ranging from net zero alliances to buyers’ pools to stimulate new climate markets. A proponent in the power of collaboration to effect systems change, Tufano is acting as Senior Advisor to Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. The Institute will draw upon the extensive expertise and resources across Harvard and beyond to develop and promote durable, effective, and equitable solutions to the climate change challenges confronting humanity.

Tufano’s work on the financial impacts of climate change on households blends his newer work on climate with his long-standing expertise in household finance.  In particular, with a variety of coauthors Tufano is studying the relationship between extreme weather—a marker of climate change—and household finances, using both very large and very targeted datasets.

Tufano’s work on business responsibilities and systems change is reflected in a number of his recent pieces and is an outgrowth of his service as Dean.  His recent HBR piece with Sandra Sucher and David Bersoff studies what people around the globe expect from business—and where they think it is falling short.  His writing over the last decade discusses the role of business schools in addressing systemic issues. His Oxford research on the corporate adoption of ESG practices as part of the Ownership Project at Oxford finds strong relationships between ownership and ESG practices.  Tufano teaches two HBS MBA RC courses—Leadership and Corporate Accountability as well as the Purpose of the Firm—that bring business responsibilities and systems change into the curriculum. 

As Dean at Oxford, Tufano championed the mission of making business, business schools, and entrepreneurship forces for justice and systems change, re-orienting the School around global challenges while transforming the gender and global composition of the class. This orientation, along with his approach of “embedding” the School within the broader University, produced the 1+1 MBA programme; the required Global Opportunities and Threats: Oxford (GOTO) course; its global analogue, Map the System; the Engaging with the Humanities Programme; the Oxford Foundry; Oxford’s joining of the Creative Destruction Lab, its Aspen-Oxford Leadership Programme, and more.

Tufano founded and chairs Commonwealth, a non-profit building financial security and opportunity for financially vulnerable people through innovation and partnerships to change systems. Their work contributed to the passage of the American Savings Promotion Act in December 2014 (which removed federal barriers to the sale of prize-linked savings product) and a decade later is currently at the forefront of workplace-based emergency savings initiatives.

Tufano earned his BA in economics (summa cum laude), MBA (with high distinction) and PhD in Business Economics at Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and earned GARP’s certification in Sustainability and Climate Risk.