A new experiential learning program provides graduate students across business, social, scientific, technical, and policy disciplines with a practical grounding in climate finance. The Climate Finance Accelerator is the result of a collaboration between Climate Positive Energy (CPE), the Rotman School of Management and the School of the Environment.
The program builds on the foundations of the School of the Environment’s graduate courses, taught by adjunct professor Susan McGeachie. In its inaugural year, 25 graduate students from Rotman School of Management, the School of the Environment, the Munk School of Global Affairs, and the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering joined the multidisciplinary program.
Together, they analyzed technologically mature solutions that, if implemented at scale, would advance climate resilience and net-zero goals, but which still face economic, legal, and regulatory hurdles. The projects identified and proposed innovative strategies to share investment costs and risks, as well as returns, among project owners, government and capital markets. Projects included a building retrofit, mine site fleet electrification, solar generation with storage, grid-scale nuclear, and a climate resilience investment. Of the five, the building retrofit and mine fleet electrification projects have advanced to the pilot stage.
Rotman MBA student Alex Foty, and alumna of the mining engineering program at McGill, represented the Climate Finance Accelerator in meetings with prospective pilot mine sites and financiers at a critical minerals financing forum in December 2023 organized by Consulate General of Canada in New York. Foty has headed back to New York in early 2024 for follow up meetings. She also met with mining companies to pitch a mine fleet electrification financing pilot at the Prospectors and Developers Association Conference (PDAC) in March 2024.
“Being part of the Climate Finance Accelerator has allowed me to merge my engineering background and corporate finance skills with the strategic approaches I've learned in my MBA,” says Foty.
“This practical application of knowledge, combined with insights from senior industry leaders, has prepared me to tackle the pressing challenges of climate finance in the mining sector upon graduation — it’s an experience I couldn’t have gotten without this program.”