Finance and the Environment at Columbia Business School

We are honoured to support the work of Dr. Alissa M. Kleinnijenhuis, who initiated the International Decarbonization Partnership (IDP), one of the most ambitious environment finance efforts globally.

Alissa is Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School, Columbia. She also holds key roles at INET Oxford, Bruegel, CEPR, and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. A pioneer in environment finance education, she taught the first environment finance course at Stanford University. Her research and thought leadership - including the widely cited Great Carbon Arbitrage - have influenced central banks, MDBs, investors, and policymakers worldwide by providing one of the first granular, country-level analyses of the economic case for phasing out coal and scaling blended environment finance.

Alissa has been instrumental in the development and structuring of the International Decarbonization Partnership, working in close collaboration with Prof. Johan Rockström to build a country-level environment finance architecture that links fossil phase-out with clean power phase-in - a model poised to accelerate whole-economy transitions in EMDEs. Most recently at COP30, she helped to lead a high-level session on scaling environment finance in order to meet the Paris 1.5°C goal. The session opened with remarks by Prof. Johan Rockström, who explained why the IDP approach is essential to aligning finance with environment science. The Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) recently formed a partnership with the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action, and both institutions have expressed interest in further exploring the IDP proposal, including the possibility of future joint work.

Her ability to unite rigorous analysis with actionable solutions makes her an extraordinary force in global environment finance.

We are proud to support and fund this vital work. We are honoured to be advisers to IDP and to have Alissa on our Science Panel for our flagship programme Scientists for Nature in collaboration with the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.