Climate finance
Impact Fellow Aneil Tripathy provides opening remarks at an MCSC outcome workshop.
Climate finance is a cross-cutting theme focused on accelerating adoption of climate and sustainability solutions through supporting collaborations between corporations and the global financial system that improve measurement, monitoring, reporting, and decision-making.
Entities that assess climate investment opportunities and companies that make financial commitments to meet climate and sustainability targets share a desire for their investments to achieve impact, with impact including both carbon reduction and social enhancement goals. However, matching financial instruments with the monitoring and measuring of impact remains a challenge.
We at the MCSC are uniquely placed to explore this topic, with connections to relevant research projects at MIT, including the Aggregate Confusion Project, as well as climate finance focused programs across our member companies. Specific research under this theme includes data communication between companies and financial markets, climate financial innovation, net zero alignment, the role of incentives in the verification and validation of ESG ratings, insets/offsets, and the financial case for corporations to use carbon markets and other tools in the climate finance space.
News Highlight
New Corporate Climate Finance Primer Reviews & Frames Ongoing MCSC Research
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Is this area relevant to your company’s climate and sustainability goals?
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All of our areas of interest have links to the MCSC Seed Awards projects.
MIT faculty members, researchers, and students interested in this impact area: we’ve got all kinds of ways for you to work with us and our member companies.
Projects
- Analysis of climate and sustainability disclosures from financial markets (Tripathy)
- Voluntary sustainability and climate reporting geared towards reporting agencies and Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) Ratings has shaped corporate ESG reporting over the last twenty years. Globally, a series of mandatory reporting regulations are now transforming corporate sustainability reporting processes. This project contextualizes quantitative analysis on climate and sustainability reports at the MIT Sloan Aggregate Confusion Project through qualitative interviews across sustainability teams at MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) corporate members. Our findings are shaped by the convenience sample of the range of company members at the MCSC that have already committed to some level of climate action.
- Real Estate Climate Finance (van der Kroft)
- Real Estate is essential in reaching net zero, accounting for 31% of US carbon emissions. A critical constraint in the real estate sector is sustainable financing, a movement of investors that cheaply provides capital to firms to initiate sustainable investments in their buildings. Such funding is essential as most technologies needed to become carbon neutral already exist (such as heat pumps, solar panels, and isolations) but are too expensive to implement. In the real estate sustainable finance research at MCSC, we strive to address these challenges and promote a more sustainable built environment. Specifically, we focus on how sustainable engagement, investors pushing firms to become more sustainable through shareholder voting, and the preferences of environmental and social issues of investors and firms play a pivotal role in achieving this.
- Aggregate Confusion Project (Sloan Sustainability Initiative)
- A program of research to improve the quality of ESG measurement and decision making in the financial sector as well as corporate climate and sustainability disclosures.
Contact Us
If you would like more information, please e-mail mcsc@mit.edu.
Who's studying this
Executive Projects Coordinator, Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC); MIT Research Affiliate; University of Bologna Research Associate
Research Scientist
Postdoctoral Associate
Postdoctoral Associate
MCSC Impact Fellow