Climate & Society Weekly Reflections
Taking advantage of my employee tuition benefits, I have been taking classes part-time in addition to my full-time job to complete the Master of Arts in Climate & Society program at The Climate School, Columbia University. This series is a weekly blog assignment for my Spring 2023 course, Applications in Climate & Society. The series captures my thoughts and reflections based on the provided prompts.
Week 3 - Feb 6
Prompt: Reflect on how alumni from the program are applying their C&S degrees in different fields. Which of the alumni’s career path(s) did you find most interesting? How does this relate to your career ambitions?
Panelists: Luc Bonnafous - World Bank Group, Sal Brzozowski - Carbon Built, Brian Kahn - Journalist. Manishka DeMel – NASA GISS, Mohammed Amin – FEMA, and Amber Hughes, NYC DCAS.
As a working climate professional and a Columbia alumna and employee for nearly 10 years, I have had many opportunities to meet and interact with many C&S alumni in the field—and even consider many as great colleagues and friends. I have met and talked with many of the panelists in various settings. It is always inspiring to see how C&S alumni have taken their respective career paths far and wide. Indeed, in order to transition towards a cleaner and more equitable world, we need climate experts in every field and sector and at all levels. Having friends and allies across different fields and industries and sectors also enable more partnerships and greater collaborations towards common goals.
One field that has yet to become formalized in higher education and training but is heavily demanded in the climate field across sectors is climate finance. More and more, even as world leaders and experts move closer towards agreement of the urgency of climate actions, the challenges remain in the what and the how. A giant question being asked over and over again remains: but how do we pay for that?
The fundamental understanding of and research into financial mechanisms for investing in climate innovations, technologies, and solutions, as well as in envisioning and executing broader mitigation and adaptation plans, would soon (if it has not already) become a necessary area of expertise. Financing for climate actions is different from typical business endeavors in the sense that economic profit returns should not be the highest prioritized objective over human lives and ecological sustainability. Climate finance is more encompassing than traditional approaches to public projects (government mandated and funded), or humanitarian aid/relief (short-term remedies rather than preventative), or international development projects (which may but do not always consider the immediate and longer term climate and environmental crises). Traditional market-focused economic theories and capitalistic models and frameworks are no longer relevant and applicable in analyzing our current crises and designing and applying solutions to these issues. It seems to me that we need climate finance to become “mainstreamed” to the rest of society beyond a limited number of research, government, and financial institutions. While I am still looking to learn as much as I can on a personal level, I am also looking to incorporate and institutionalize this knowledge through my work.
I have spent the past two weeks traveling to and working on my latest project in Vietnam. Our goal is ambitious: designing and building a program to train the next generation of young leaders in the Lower Mekong and empower them with the foundational climate and environmental knowledge as well as the soft skills and project implementation experience they need to begin (or continue) working on the climate, environmental, and biodiversity challenges faced by their communities. Our week-long workshop focused on curriculum design with professors across the schools and institutions in Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh’s system. Many of the experts at the table had spent decades studying environmental, climate, and biodiversity science and issues, and the it seemed almost impossible to imagine how we may condense this vast universe of information into a digestible self-paced and facilitator-guided curriculum for the participants in the program.
But magic often happens when many heads are put together: we came up with a framework for structuring the materials based on selected sets of overlapping issues, concepts, and interdisciplinary strategies and solutions that participants can apply and reference over and over again as they approach any climate and environmental challenges. In creating this framework and adopting the common structure for each learning module, we encourage the learners to approach each issue topic with a set of key considerations and questions, as well as gather and analyze data and information as needed, and then stress-testing their devised ideas and solutions through different lenses and aspects, such as financial sustainability and linking to similar efforts at different scales. As we dive deeper into content development, examples of mechanisms for financing climate initiatives and solutions at the local as well as national, regional, and global level will be introduced and considered.