International Climate Finance · TA

From fall 2025 through January 2026, I served as a teaching assistant for CLMTC 5052, International Climate Finance, taught by Lisa Sachs at the Columbia Climate School. The class brought together graduate students from across Columbia.

What the course is

The course asks how climate capital is raised, allocated, and constrained across mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. It does not assume that mobilizing more private money is an answer by itself. Topics include:

• Concessional and blended-finance structures, including how risk, return, and tenor differ across layers of capital
• Debt sustainability, debt-for-climate swaps, and sovereign risk in emerging markets, with public case studies used to examine both the possibilities and limits of these tools
• The cost of capital and credit-rating practices as structural factors in who receives climate finance
• The UNFCCC architecture, the Green Climate Fund, the Loss and Damage Fund, the IMF's Resilience and Sustainability Trust, and proposals for multilateral development bank reform
• Voluntary and compliance carbon markets, with attention to their observed role rather than only their stated purpose

One question recurs throughout: does a structure let capital go somewhere it otherwise could not, or does it merely give an old institutional preference a better name?

What I did

• Held weekly office hours and helped students work through concepts, readings, and quantitative exercises
• Graded quizzes and cumulative assessments using the course rubric
• Built and tested illustrative exercises on layered capital structures, leverage constraints, and the pricing of concessional support
• Tracked recurring points of confusion and helped reinforce them in later teaching materials
• Supported case discussions on just-transition finance and debt-for-climate instruments

The exercises described here are summarized at a high level. No student work, grades, or private statements are reproduced.

Get the mechanism right first

The most useful questions often begin with a term that sounds settled. "First loss," for example, may describe funded junior capital in one document and a contingent promise in another. Other conversations climb one level higher: does the financing structure change who holds power and who bears risk at all?

Both questions matter. One asks how an instrument works; the other asks what it is for. Teaching the course made me more certain that technical precision and institutional criticism are not rivals. Serious criticism begins by getting the mechanism right.

Why I took it

I took the role partly because I wanted teaching to sharpen my modeling. Explaining a guarantee or subordinated tranche forces me to separate the legal promise, the cash flow in the model, and the economic transfer of risk. Once I have had to explain those distinctions aloud, they are harder to blur the next time I build them.

The role also made me more careful with words such as "catalytic." Before capital earns that description, I want to know what changed, what remained constrained, and whether the same outcome would have happened without it.

Course: CLMTC 5052, Prof. Lisa Sachs, Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment.