The Institute believes that finance should be a key actor of the urgent collective transformation that sustainability implies, working for that purpose in close interaction with political actors, international organisations, NGOs, civil society and academic institutions.
The Institute has a long-standing academic tradition of connecting finance with development. It is building on these strengths to expand its contributions towards finance and sustainability – on the teaching as well as on the research and expertise fronts.
- The Graduate Institute is launching a track in sustainable finance and development as part of its Master of International Economics programme, along with a specialisation in Sustainable Trade and Finance, which will be part of the newly reformed Master of International and Development Studies. Moreover, the Institute will be launching in September 2022 a one-year Master in Sustainable Finance for Development, the first of its kind in Switzerland.
- At the intersection of research, expertise and practice, the Centre for Finance and Development launched the Swiss Lab for Sustainable Finance in September 2021, with the generous support of the Pictet Foundation for Development.
“We see three main challenges in sustainable finance”, said Marie-Laure Salles, Director of the Graduate Institute. “The first is the need for a systemic approach to integrated impact measurement; the second is for finance to address fast enough our urgent environmental and climate issues; the third is for the industry to take the full measure of the social dimension of the sustainability challenge, the risks associated with not addressing it, and the business opportunities that addressing it will create”.
“Our goal is to advance research and practice in sustainable finance to address challenges in scaling up investments to meet the sustainable development goals”, explained Nathan Sussman, Professor of International Economics, Pictet Chair in Finance and Development, and Director of the Centre for Finance and Development. “We will create multi-stakeholder partnerships between Swiss universities, universities from low-income countries, international organisations and the sustainable finance industry, and we will train the next generation of researchers in sustainable finance.”
In addition to the Graduate Institute, the Swiss Lab for Sustainable Finance’s founding members are Enterprise for Society (E4S), the Institute for Management Development (IMD), the University of Basel, the University of Geneva, the University of Lausanne, the University of Ghana, Sustainable Finance Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).
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