Students Reflection Blogs from their Sustainable Investing Research Consulting Project Experience.
Coming from the energy sector, especially in business development, I’ve seen how much financing and investment decisions can decide whether climate goals actually move forward or just stay as plans. That curiosity pushed me to dive deeper into sustainable investing and eventually brought me to the SIRI Practicum at SIPA.
As part of my SIRI practicum, I am working with a global alternative investment fund that manages $48 billion in assets...
In the SIRI Practicum class, my team and I are working with a South American NGO that promotes investment in sustainable businesses that benefit the local Amazonian communities...
The SIRI practicum is an opportunity at Columbia to gain faculty-supported consulting experience in sustainable investment. In my case, this is in the scope of Fukuoka, a Japanese city confronted with modern challenges: an ageing and shrinking population, new businesses preferring to locate in the capital Tokyo and meeting its own net-zero climate targets. As a group of four SIPA students, we are going to support our SIRI client by identifying how the city can attract local and international start-ups and small businesses that will make the city future ready.
This semester, I have the privilege of being part of the Sustainable Investing Research Consulting Class at Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI). I am working with a client that represents both an innovation center and an angel private equity fund. The client focuses on developing and financing solutions in the longevity space, with a mission to connect global stakeholders and scale sustainable innovations...
Energy sustainability, climate finance, and carbon markets remain core themes within the global energy sector. After over a decade of contributing to diverse projects in the energy industry, I now recognize the critical importance of aligning energy initiatives with peacebuilding objectives, a convergence that is increasingly prioritized by policymakers. The opportunity to consult on projects centered in Africa, aimed at deploying renewable energy solutions in conflict zones, reveals the vast potential to address endemic energy shortages while supporting regional stability.
This is the reflection of a skeptic tasked with building a framework for a paradigm that runs countercurrent to her deepest financial assumptions. This semester, I’ve immersed myself in the nuanced and often contentious field of system-level investing through a hands-on practicum. My team's charge is to develop a novel framework for measuring how institutional investors grapple with systemic risks.
The garment industry is woven into my personal story - quite literally. With my Pakistani background, and a family business in the textile and medical uniforms, I learned supply chains not from business books but from walking factory floors...
The project I am working on is situated within the financial sector, with a specific focus on the emerging sustainable finance landscape in Armenia. This involves examining how domestic financial institutions—such as commercial banks, insurance companies, pension funds, and microfinance organizations—are beginning to integrate sustainability considerations into their activities, and how regulatory frameworks, taxonomies, and capital market infrastructure are evolving to support these efforts.
This semester, I am working on a project that sits at the intersection of corporate accountability, supply chain transparency, and international development, specifically examining sustainability reporting practices within the textile and apparel industry. The project focuses on understanding how large garment retailers' sustainability reporting influences or fails to influence the reporting practices of smaller companies throughout their value chains, with a particular emphasis on labor-related impacts in South Asia, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and India.
While I was applying to SIPA back in 2023, I remember I had written in my application essay that I want to work for ensuring labor rights in global supply chains of multinational companies. This passion comes from my experience of working in civil society and partnering with the private sector and government for labor rights in India. When I finally came to SIPA, hardly a semester had passed and the development landscape in the US and consequentially in other parts of the world changed drastically...
The finance sector plays a defining role in shaping the trajectory of our world. By deciding where capital flows, assessing risks, and setting investment priorities, finance ultimately determines which ideas take root and which opportunities fade. Increasingly, however, finance is being asked to go beyond profit maximization and risk management. A growing movement seeks to align capital with positive social and environmental outcomes, a shift embodied in the rise of impact investing.