Climate Finance
Students acquire state-of-art-knowledge about an emerging field at the intersection of academia and industry: Climate Finance. With “Real world Exploration through Active Learning via DATa-based Approach” (REAL_DATA), they are put into the shoes of a sustainability expert of a bank and learn how to analyze the impact of climate on firms via real case studies of actual companies. Their learning journey is supported by lectures, a platform, videos and participatory activities (quizzes, mock debates).
Keywords
Course description
Project description
Project goals:
The course aims to enable students to acquire relevant skills for research and finance sector jobs and to make a positive impact on the climate crisis via ETH graduates’ knowledge and expertise. It helps students to learn about the nature of climate change phenomenon and its impact on the economy and the financial system. The students learn how to determine climate change-related risks and opportunities for various economic actors. They also get familiar with state-of-the-art methods and tools in the financial climate change –related risk assessment, and receive an opportunity to apply methods and tools for the analysis of the real investment portfolios.
Leading universities strive to provide their graduates with state-of-art-knowledge and encourage the influx of innovation into industry. This becomes specifically challenging for emerging fields at the intersection of academia and industry when no textbooks and structured teaching plans exist yet, and there is constant inflow of new methodologies and techniques. Climate Finance is a unique course which addresses this issue by introducing a novel approach for active learning - “Real world Exploration through Active Learning via DATa-based Approach”(REAL-DATA). Inspired by the case studies of law schools, this approach allows the students to feel themselves in the shoes of sustainability expert of a bank, insurance company, financial analyst or a wealthy investor and “learn-by-doing” on the real-world examples. It encourages students to learn about the field of Climate Finance through solving real case studies during the course.
The objectives of this course:
1. Students learn about current challenges in the fields of sustainable finance, environmental finance and climate finance, and get equipped with existing methods to solve these challenges.
2.Students develop critical thinking skills (argumentation, communication) via small-group tasks during the class (debates, questionnaires) and by working on the assessment task during the course.
3.Students apply methods discussed in the course to the real-world cases and evaluate a chosen company from the perspective of climate-related financial risks (develop criteria for evaluation, perform climate risk analysis, derive recommendations).
Procedure: At the beginning of the lecture course students are divided into groups. Students can select their group themselves, but it is strongly advised to create a group from the members with a different expertise (e.g. an MTEC student, Environmental Sciences student, Mechanical Engineering student). PhD students need to show a higher level of expertise to get the credits, therefore, they are paired together. Each group is assigned a company to analyze (e.g. Tesla, Volkswagen, Deutsche Bank). As participants of the course learn about major concepts, methods and tools through the course, they are asked to apply their knowledge for the assessment of the company they chose which fosters learning of the concepts and encourages critical thinking. During the lectures, students learn how to explore and identify useful information in financial and climate-related data, filter methods for a given task and apply them to real case studies of actual companies. On the one hand, they are given tools and methodologies during the lectures, on the other hand, they are encouraged to use their creativity in application of this knowledge, in developing their own techniques and in using these techniques on real-world examples. These skills are particularly relevant for the interdisciplinary fields that are also at the intersection of academia and industry.
Experiences:
1. A crucial part of the students’ learning experience is an assessment task which encourages knowledge exchange between the students and re-enforces the learning process. In order to support students in the preparation of the assessment task, each group is provided with additional information and data-printouts for their chosen company.
2. Additional experiences of the students include various participatory learning activities including “Think-pair-share”, EduApp quizzes, Klicker questionnaires and application of the “REAL-DATA” in the classroom using printouts of financial and sustainability statements of chosen companies.
Each activity is tailored to the chosen learning objective of the course’s chapter. The results are discussed in the class and all students’ inputs are recorded and saved in their group’s folders. This way they have an opportunity to review their own input and input of their peers after the lecture. In order to achieve learning objectives, various activities and tools were implemented and a Moodle platform was developed with videos, industry reports, financial statements, students’ inputs and work assignments.
