Opening doors for climate finance scholars
Harvard’s convening power scales a global classroom
Climate finance is a fast-growing field, but until recently there was no clear way for PhD students to begin researching it. Harvard Business School’s Peter Tufano, a senior advisor at the Salata Institute, spotted the mismatch: interest was rising, yet the academic footprint was still small, with a modest foothold in the top finance journals and conferences.
The core problem was not enthusiasm, but a bottleneck inside academia. Too few students at any one university meant too little reason to run a specialist doctoral course, and too few faculty felt ready to teach and supervise the work. If climate finance was to move from the fringe to the center, the field needed more trained professors as well as more students.
So Tufano developed a practical fix, using Harvard’s convening power to bring the scattered demand into one shared classroom. The result was Financial Economics of Climate and Sustainability (FECS): a global doctoral reading group with 24 hours of hybrid sessions each spring semester, a curated syllabus, and teaching from leading scholars.
Early outcomes that look like systems change
FECS works because it is designed to be copied. It creates shared teaching materials and a common forum where students and faculty compare notes across institutions. In three years, from 2023 to 2025, it grew from 15 to 145 universities in 39 countries, with government research groups also joining. This year, participants are joining from 163 institutions. To date, more than 2,300 doctoral students and researchers have participated in the course, which has been recognized by the Financial Times Responsible Business Education awards.
But rapid growth can dilute engagement if it is not paired with local support. FECS avoids that by requiring each participating university to name a local faculty coordinator who connects the course to seminars, mentoring, assignments, and campus research life. Now a network of roughly 170 coordinators adapt the model locally and share what works.
Now in its fourth year, FECS does not claim credit for the nascent boom in climate finance research, but the pattern is consistent with the systems change theory the program was designed to activate: positive feedback loops (more researchers producing work, more outlets sharing it, more conferences and journals legitimizing it), reinforced by collaboration over time across many top schools.
How the Salata Institute is addressing climate education
FECS shows how climate education must be an ecosystem, rather than a single course on a single campus. By coordinating top faculty, pooling dispersed demand, and seeding local research communities worldwide, Harvard and the Salata Institute helped turn a missing pathway into a durable platform for training the next generation of climate finance scholars.