International Climate Finance — TA

Teaching Assistant for CLMTC 5052 — International Climate Finance, taught by Lisa Sachs at the Columbia Climate School, Fall 2025 through January 2026. One of two TAs on a course of graduate students from SIPA, Climate, and across Columbia.

What the course is

A critical survey of the international climate finance landscape — how capital is mobilized, allocated, and constrained across mitigation, adaptation, and loss & damage globally. Weekly readings and lectures build up a picture of:

• The architecture of concessional and blended finance, and where each tranche's patience meets the asset's cash-flow profile
• Debt sustainability frameworks, debt-for-climate swaps, and sovereign risk in emerging markets
• Cost-of-capital drivers and credit-rating practices as structural determinants of who actually gets funded
• The UNFCCC framework, the Green Climate Fund, the Loss and Damage Fund, and the innovative financial architectures being proposed around them
• Carbon markets — voluntary and compliance — and their actual rather than advertised role in the system

What I did

• Ran office hours and weekly recitations
• Graded the midterm and final cumulative assessments and the weekly quizzes
• Built modeling exercises for blended-finance case studies — the memorable one being a layered DFI-commercial-concessional stack around an EM solar developer
• Sat in on lectures, took notes on where students got stuck, flagged those sections for reinforcement

Why I took it

I wanted the teaching side to inform the modeling side. When you've spent a semester explaining why a first-loss guarantee is priced the way it is, the next time you see one in a term sheet you read it differently. The course also happens to be one of the best windows into what actually moves capital in this space — the answer, often, is not what the glossy reports say.