Finance meets climate at Cornell panel

Finance can bridge the gap between climate science and business decision-making - and communication, innovation and education are critical, according to a panel of experts convened by the Cornell SC Johnson College of Businessand the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainabilityduring Climate Week 2025.

The event, held Sept. 23 at 570 Lexington Ave. in New York City, brought together industry leaders, academics and journalists to discuss the issues and hear lightning talks by winners of the 2025 global Finance for the Futureawards. Andrew Karolyi, the Charles Field Knight Dean of the SC Johnson College, and Alan Martinez, lead of climate and nature finance at Cornell Atkinson, moderated the discussion.

"CFOs weren't even in the room," said Linda Giuliano, MBA '02, founder and CEO of BrightWorld ESG, recalling early in her career at a major investment firm when she raised sustainability issues for the first time. Over time, she said, demand from European and Australian clients, combined with better data, led investment teams to reconsider factoring climate risks into portfolios.

Sarah Wolfolds, senior lecturer at the SC Johnson College, highlighted research by Assistant Professor Emma Wang, which found that certification alone isn't enough to build investor trust in green bonds; instead ongoing transparency is required to address concerns about greenwashing.

Within organizations, Wolfolds added, progress requires cross-functional collaboration. Otherwise, she said, "sustainability practices won't achieve their full potential."

Giuliano said she spent years conducting listening tours to explain the importance of integrating environmental, social and governance values into business processes to skeptical investors. Use of that data gained traction only when integrated into analysts' existing tools, she said.

Karolyi served as lead judge of the 2025 Finance for the Future awards. The winners included Banco BV, a Brazilian bank that is experimenting with carbon credit-backed financial products to decarbonize its portfolio; Proparco, a French development finance institution channeling long-term capital into recycling and low-carbon manufacturing; and UK-based Finance Earth, which is piloting price-guarantee mechanisms so fashion brands can adopt sustainable materials without prohibitive costs.

After the event, Cornell students joined the Finance for the Future winners in a case lab workshop to develop case studies based on their experiences, which will be submitted for publication and used in classrooms at Cornell and beyond.

During their discussion, the panelists noted that the projects illustrated how leaders can signal the value of experimentation, the importance of finding allies within an organization and the need to build external coalitions.

Andrew Jack, global education editor at the Financial Times,said that business schools can positively influence the next generation of decision-makers, in part by ensuring that climate and biodiversity research moves quickly from journals into classrooms and boardrooms.

Embedding climate risk into core accounting training, weaving sustainability across all disciplines and requiring experiential learning based on real-world problems with live data - each of these approaches can improve business education, the panelists said.

"Our responsibility is to pursue the science relentlessly and then help carry it into corporate practice through partnerships, case studies and practitioner engagement," Karolyi said.

Maria Minsker is a freelance writer for the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.