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 about 60 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 — including a detailed look at the Cabo Verde and Barbados deals as case studies of what these structures can and cannot do
• Cost-of-capital drivers and credit-rating practices as structural determinants of who actually gets funded — Lisa's argument here, which I'd encourage anyone in this space to read, is that the cost-of-capital gap between EM and OECD investments is itself a climate finance problem, not just a market reality
• The UNFCCC framework, the Green Climate Fund, the Loss and Damage Fund, and the innovative financial architectures (Bridgetown 2.0, the IMF's RST, MDB reform proposals) being layered on top
• Carbon markets — voluntary and compliance — and their actual rather than advertised role in the system

The course is taught with a particular temperament: it doesn't accept that "blended finance" or "private capital mobilization" are self-evidently good things. The whole semester is an inquiry into when those structures actually move capital toward the energy transition, and when they're laundering institutional preferences through the language of impact.

What I did

• Ran weekly office hours (Mondays, 5–6:30 PM), which were the most consistently useful 90 minutes of my week
• Graded the midterm and final cumulative assessments and the weekly quizzes — about 60 students, so by the end I had a calibrated sense of which kinds of arguments held up under second readings and which fell apart
• Built modeling exercises for blended-finance case studies. The memorable one was a layered DFI-commercial-concessional stack around an EM solar developer, where students had to figure out the maximum commercial leverage that was supportable given the concessional and DFI tranches' return expectations. About a third of the class converged to the right answer; another third got close but mis-priced the concessional patience; the last third tried to optimize and missed the structural point
• Sat in on lectures, took notes on where students got stuck, flagged those sections for reinforcement in the next week's recitation
• Helped design two of the case discussions — the one on the Just Energy Transition Partnership for South Africa, and the one on debt-for-climate swap pricing

What office hours taught me

The most valuable hour in any course is the one where a student asks the question they're embarrassed to ask in lecture. Some weeks that question was "I don't actually understand what 'first loss' means in this context" — which is not a stupid question, because the term is used differently in different layers of the literature. Some weeks it was "is this whole framework just a slow concession to the global financial architecture, and if so, are we training ourselves to be its best lobbyists?" — which is also not a stupid question.

Both deserve real answers. The course's seriousness is partly in the willingness to engage with the second one as carefully as the first.

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.

It also pulled me into Lisa's research orbit, which is its own gift. Watching someone who has spent twenty years on this question think about it in real time is the part of graduate school the brochures don't sell properly.

Course: CLMTC 5052, Prof. Lisa Sachs (Director, Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment).