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This entry pertains to the Structured Finance to Fund Climate Solutions workshop, held on September 8, 2025 at the UC Washington DC campus.

Introduction

The workshop had a pragmatic flavor: not just theory, but also structured brainstorms about how finance can be mobilized to scale climate solutions. The format alternated between short talks and moderated brainstorms, with a deliberate emphasis on practicality. The unifying question was how to use financial engineering to accelerate the transition.

Paper & Keynote Sessions

• Adair Morse (UC Berkeley) gave the opening talk “Financing Solutions.” She spoke about ways we can “mobilize” finance to scale climate technologies, with a particular emphasis on building the “capital stack.” Another interesting point was on figuring out how solar became economical and then asking how to accelerate that “time-to-economic” for other green technologies. She framed this not just as a sequencing problem but as a design problem: what structures will get us there faster?
• Tomas Williams (GWU) presented “Green versus Conventional Corporate Debt: From Issuances to Emissions.” The paper relies on a massive dataset: 127,123 debt transactions from 50,832 firms across 85 countries, requiring multiple data sources — an incredible data exercise. The central question is how firms use green versus conventional debt instruments to raise capital, and what the consequences are for emissions.
• Zak Weston (Market Shaping Initiative) presented “Structured Markets, Structured Finance: Market Shaping Strategies for Climate.” Essentially a case study of the alternative protein industry, his talk made the case for market shaping tools like volume guarantees, which are proven mechanisms to address technological risk. He also emphasized that traditional capital markets are ill-suited for this role. This point reminded me of Andrew Lo’s WFA luncheon address on financing pharmaceutical innovation, where he highlighted similar mismatches between technological risk and capital market structure.
• Caroline Flammer (Columbia) gave the keynote on “Blended Finance.” She began by laying out the economic rationale for preserving biodiversity, then illustrated a fund structure where senior LPs (institutional investors, corporations) are paired with junior LPs (governments, DFIs, philanthropic foundations). The junior tranche absorbs first losses, catalyzing institutional participation. A notable audience comment compared the IFC, which increasingly behaves like a commercial bank, to the World Bank, which still tolerates sub-market returns for developmental goals. The presentation captured both the promise and the political economy constraints of blended structures.
• Kelly McNamara (Food System Innovations) presented “Philanthropic Landscape in Climate Finance.” In general, foundations control ~$320B globally, but only ~$5.4B goes to climate. She shared practical examples like GEAPP (Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet) and the Climate Finance Partnership (Hewlett + BlackRock + Grantham). Another key point that she emphasized is that food systems account for roughly one-third of global GHG emissions, yet receive relatively little philanthropic (and academic) focus.
• Nirvikar Singh (UCSC) presented “Financing India’s Green Transition.” India’s per capita energy consumption is <40% of the world average, yet the economy is still heavily coal- and oil-dependent, especially for transport. Meeting climate goals requires $50–$160B in annual investment—a scale that underscores the magnitude of the challenge.
• Chetan Hebbale (The Nature Conservancy) presented “Debt-for-Nature Swaps.” These are innovative but still nascent arrangements, typically structured through SPVs with political risk insurance from DFC and partial credit guarantees. They sit in the broader “debt-for-whatever” category (as Matt Levine quipped in a timely newsletter), but with tangible traction in climate policy circles.
• Sarah Duffy (Oxford) presented “Climate Change, Adaptation, and Sovereign Risk.” This was a job market paper with a nice model of sovereign default risk inteacting with climate adaptation. Climate change raises borrowing costs; adaptation reduces them; but high borrowing costs constrain adaptation, creating an adaptation trap. Empirically, she uses text analysis to measure adaptation expenditures in government budgets and shows that sovereign ratings improve with adaptation. For example, in the Caribbean, she estimates ~10% of GDP losses from cyclones are due to default risk itself, which can be mitigated by debt relief.
• Piyush Gandhi & Drishan Banerjee (UCSC) presented “Stakeholders of Nature-based Adaptation,” which is an ambitious mapping exercise that catalogues asset classes exposed to climate risks: residential/commercial real estate, natural assets (beaches), public assets (roads), agricultural assets. They simulate flood scenarios to estimate damages under different adaptation measures, with and without investment.