Climate and Sustainable Finance
Skema Business School, Paris and UCL, London
The objective of the course is to provide students with relevant sustainable finance tools used by practitioners and policy makers in the context of climate change and net zero transition. The course will provide the foundations about academic theories, policies and regulations around climate and sustainable finance to allow the students to understand and participate in the climate debate.
The first part of the course will provide a framing of the role of sustainable finance in the broader climate context with a focus on i. the threats posed by climate change risk on financial stability and on financial institutions and ii. the challenges and the opportunities that financial institutions are facing in the net zero transition. This part will start from the underlying environmental economics and climate finance theory and will then delve into policies and emerging regulation. This part will also provide an overview of the tools used practitioners working in climate and sustainable finance.
The second part will cover in more details the tools needed for assessing climate related risk – physical and transition risk – with focus on stress testing. This part will be complemented with practical exercises and case studies.
The third part will cover the tools needed for assessing the alignment of financial institutions’ portfolios with the objective of the Paris agreement. This last part will discuss more broadly how finance can support a range of sustainable development goals (e.g., UN sustainable development goals, biodiversity)