“The financial market is one of the most powerful tools in the world,” Kuo says. “There are people within finance who are trying to use it for the better”—like the course’s creator, Adjunct Professor Ricardo Bayon ’89, who founded Encourage Capital, an “impact investment” firm focused on environmentalism and social issues. For Kuo, the course showed her the possibilities of finance as a career for “positive social change.”

Follow the money

When Bayon joined the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society’s advisory board, he recalls that he “kept saying that the biggest interface between environment and society is the financial world, and that if you don’t really understand or work with how money flows, it’s hard to really have an impact on any given environmental issue.” He recognized that more courses at Brown and other universities need to address the role of capitalism and finance in environmental change.

About three years ago, he started working on Finance and the Environment with two students at Brown, Kobi Weinberg ’20—at the time a senior studying environmental science—and Cristian Olander Echavarria ’22, then a junior concentrating in economics. Weinberg and Echavarria had both previously interned at Encourage Capital, and in designing the curriculum, the team drew heavily on Encourage’s work in areas of water, plastics, carbon issues, and social environmental problems to establish the course’s main components.

The standard lecture component starts off with the very basics of finance: What is money? What are bonds? How do debt and stocks work? What is the Fed and how do interest rates impact us? “The attempt was to have a class that would be good for people who have never had exposure to finance and never really had that much of an interest in it to show them why they should have an interest in it, why they should try to understand it,” Bayon explains. As Kuo puts it, bluntly, “In order for these [environmental] projects to get funding and really become a project that can make a change, they need money.”

The lectures then break up into case studies examining how finance and financial tools interact with key environmental problems. Lectures feature guest speakers and panel discussions, where groups of students prepare and moderate conversations with industry professionals and experts. “You have almost every week one class that is fully dedicated to panelists,” says teaching assistant Naemi Ditiatkovsky ’25. These panelists are “doing the work that you’re reading about, you’re talking about, that Professor Bayon is lecturing about.” Topics range from green bonds to climate regulation to Environmental Social Governance (ESG).

For Emma Amselem Bensadon ’24, the biggest takeaway came from a panel on regulation and carbon markets. Moderating the conversation, she asked one of the speakers about the controversy surrounding carbon credits.