International Climate Finance · TA

Teaching Assistant for CLMTC 5052, International Climate Finance, taught by Lisa Sachs at the Columbia Climate School, from fall 2025 through January 2026. I supported graduate students from across Columbia.

What the course is

The course critically surveys how capital is mobilized, allocated, and constrained across climate mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. Its 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

The course does not treat blended finance or private-capital mobilization as automatically beneficial. A recurring question is whether a structure genuinely changes where capital can go, or simply repackages an existing institutional preference.

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.

What office hours taught me

The most useful questions often begin with a term that sounds settled but is not. "First loss," for example, can refer to different funded or contingent arrangements depending on the document. Other conversations begin one level higher and ask whether a financing framework changes the underlying allocation of power and risk at all.

Both kinds of question deserve care. One asks how an instrument works. The other asks what the instrument is for. Teaching the course made clear that technical accuracy and institutional critique strengthen each other when they are handled seriously.

Why I took it

I wanted teaching to sharpen my modeling. Explaining a guarantee or subordinated tranche forces you to distinguish the legal promise, the modeled cash flow, and the economic risk transfer. The next time the same instrument appears in an analytical exercise, those distinctions are harder to blur.

The role also gave me a more disciplined view of what climate-finance structures can accomplish, where they remain constrained, and what evidence is needed before calling capital catalytic.

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