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Sovereign Risk Ceilings: Rethinking Credit Assessment Through Risk Disaggregation
Read more about Sovereign Risk Ceilings: Rethinking Credit Assessment Through Risk Disaggregation

Financing Climate & Sustainable Development / Report

Sovereign Risk Ceilings: Rethinking Credit Assessment Through Risk Disaggregation

Diagnosing how the sovereign ceiling functions as a simplifying shortcut that can obscure meaningful differences across borrowers, and proposing an alternative credit rating approach based on disaggregating sovereign risk into specific transmission channels.

  • IZ
  • Robert Ginsburg, Senior Fellow
  • WW+3

Igor Zelezetskii and 5 more

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Financing Climate & Sustainable Development

CCSI at New York Climate Week 2026

Date: Sep 22 - 26, 2026

Time: edt

Location: New York, New York

CCSI at New York Climate Week 2026

Last year, we left Climate Week with a list of conversations we drove, and still wanted to drive differently.

This year, our team will be convening, contributing to, and participating in conversations spanning sovereign finance, critical minerals, industrial decarbonization, AI governance, nature, and the fundamental question of how capital can be made to flow where it’s needed most.

The events below reflect where our thinking currently is — and where we hope to push it further, together with partners, practitioners, and policymakers who are wrestling with the same challenges. 

Systematic Change to Mitigate Systemic Risks: How Asset Managers Can Facilitate Genuine Carbon Reduction in the Global Economy

Hosted by: Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, Federated Hermes

Mobilizing commercial capital for climate mitigation at scale requires more than better disclosure or smarter accounting. It requires rethinking the system. At a roundtable during London Climate Action Week, senior stakeholders across the financial ecosystem surfaced a core tension: the frameworks designed to manage risk are not the same as the ones needed to make new, desirable systems financeable — and conflating the two risks pushing capital away from where it is needed most.

This Part Two picks up where that conversation left off. Convening senior leaders across asset management, government, development finance, and industry, the discussion will convert ideas into a handful of practical, system-level solutions — focused on what asset managers, in collaboration with others, can do to shape where capital flows at scale.

Invite only

Navigating AI for Sustainable Futures: Managing Risks and Unlocking Opportunities

Hosted by: Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, Hitachi R&D

Location: Pulitzer Hall, Columbia University

Much of today’s AI governance debate is organized around discrete risks — bias, misinformation, labor displacement. This framing misses a deeper question: how should societies govern a technology whose impacts evolve faster than the science and regulatory capacity meant to oversee it?

AI governance is inseparable from sustainability — not climate alone, but the full transition spanning energy, industry, labor, finance, and the information environments democratic decision-making depends on. AI shapes whether that transition succeeds or fails, which makes governing AI well a sustainability question in its own right.

Building on our report AI and Sustainability Transitions, this Climate Week event argues that AI governance and sustainability governance face the same institutional problem — and that the communities working on each urgently need to speak to one another.

Registration details coming soon

The Cool House

Hosted by: REEF

Location: Workville by Oasis, 315 W 35th St, New York, NY 10001

The Montreal Protocol proved that global cooperation works. The Kigali Amendment proved that climate action can scale. Cool House celebrates the people, partnerships, and innovations turning those commitments into measurable impact, interactive exhibits, live demonstrations, expert discussions, networking, and hands-on experiences into a full-day celebration of sustainable cooling.

Decarbonizing the HVAC sector goes beyond swapping out refrigerants or deploying heat pumps. CCSI’s work argues that three pillars — Refrigerant Transition, Refrigerant Circularity, and Energy Efficiency — must move in lockstep. Pursued in isolation, synergies are lost and trade-offs overstated. Pursued together, they offer a path to comprehensive, durable emissions reduction.

Stop by our table in the Community Hub to share where you see the biggest barriers — and what’s enabling progress.

Register here

Leadership at the Intersection of Capital and Sustainability

What does it actually mean for corporate leaders to take climate seriously — and where do current frameworks fall short? Lisa Sachs joins Samara Rudolph, Senior Director of Sustainability at Rivian, for a conversation on leadership at the intersection of capital and sustainability. Drawing on her recent work arguing that the proliferation of net-zero targets has not translated into commensurate emissions reductions — and that corporate climate action needs to shift from entity-level accounting toward systems transformation — and on her report From Planetary Hazard to Financial Stability, Lisa will bring a clear-eyed view of what finance and corporate actors can and cannot do on their own.

Request an invitation

Securing growth in a resource-constrained world

Hosted by: Earth Finance, SpatiaFi

Location: TBA

Every growth plan rests on assumptions about the physical world — that water and power will be available, infrastructure will hold, and critical supplies will arrive. Those assumptions are breaking down.

Earth Finance is convening a cross-disciplinary panel on Spatial Finance: the integration of geospatial data, AI, and analytics into financial decision-making at the asset level. The discussion will examine what leaders need to know before deploying capital in a resource-constrained world, and why traditional risk models increasingly fall short.

CCSI’s Lisa Sachs will join the panel alongside experts spanning finance, academia, and industry. The panel will be followed by a networking reception and live demonstrations of SpatiaFi, Earth Finance’s spatial finance platform.

Register here

Making Critical Mineral Recovery Bankable and Insurable

Hosted by: Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, Carbon Trust, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Buckstop, Solas Capital

Location: 729 7th Ave floor 3, New York, NY 10019, United States

The clean energy transition faces acute critical mineral shortages, yet billions of dollars in recoverable materials sit trapped inside deployed and retired assets — treated as waste because lenders and insurers cannot yet track, value, or underwrite them. This “bankability gap” keeps embedded critical minerals off balance sheets, borrowing bases, and insurance policies, even as supply chains tighten. Getting valuation and risk models right is essential to unlocking these materials as an investable asset class.

This convening brings together lenders, insurers, institutional investors, and circularity practitioners for a solutions-focused conversation. A short keynote sets the stage, followed by a panel built around three focused questions on bankability, live audience questions, and blended networking at themed tables. The session runs under the Chatham House Rule. Breakfast provided.

Register here

Not Just Extraction: Africa's Minerals, Industrial Policy, and Financing for Sustainable Development

Hosted by: Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, ClimateWorks Foundation

Location: Virgin Hotel, NYC

African mineral-rich countries have a common—though not always coordinated—ambition to move from raw mineral suppliers toward increased beneficiation and downstream industrialization, but the ambition has outpaced implementation. Gaps hindering its implementation include insufficient legal and policy frameworks, capacity, technology, hard and soft infrastructure, regional coordination, and finance. African governments face high costs of capital and constrained public budgets. Regional integration remains thin, and bilateral dealmaking can work against African objectives. CCSI’s applied research speaks directly to this gap.

This closed, invite-only session convenes civil society organizations, think tanks, researchers, and funders working on critical minerals, industrial policy, energy, and development finance to identify practical next steps for minerals-based sustainable development in Africa.

Registration details coming soon

When Numbers Aren't Enough: Braiding Knowledge Systems for Nature-Based Solutions in Mining

Hosted by: Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, Vale Base Metals

Location: Columbia Faculty House, Garden Room 1

As demand for critical minerals grows, so does the need for approaches that protect ecosystems, strengthen community resilience, and support sustainable development. While scientific data and technological innovation are essential, they are often most effective when combined with local and Indigenous knowledge systems.

Building on CCSI and Vale Base Metals’ collaboration on nature-based solutions for sustainable mining, this in-person roundtable will explore how different knowledge systems can be brought together to improve the design and implementation of nature-based solutions across the mining lifecycle.

The discussion will bring together leaders from industry, academia, Indigenous and community organisations, and civil society to explore: (1) how traditional ecological knowledge and innovation can strengthen nature-based solutions in mining, (2) opportunities to advance climate adaptation, resilience, and biodiversity outcomes through collaboration and (3) what meaningful partnerships between companies and communities look like in practice..

Through case studies and facilitated discussion, participants will identify practical lessons and opportunities for action.

Register your interest here

Repricing Emerging Market Risk: Sovereign Ceilings, Guarantees, and the Cost of Capital

Hosted by: Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, Environmental Defense Fund, Africa Practice, Emerging Markets Investors Alliance

Location: Environmental Defense Fund, NYC

Emerging markets and developing economies face a persistent cost of capital penalty that makes financing more expensive than project risks often warrant. A key driver is the sovereign ceiling — capping a project’s credit assessment at its host country’s sovereign rating, regardless of its own risk profile. Getting this right, and understanding where risk mitigation instruments can help, has direct consequences for EMDE infrastructure financing.

This invite-only roundtable brings investors and practitioners together for a solutions-focused conversation on repricing this risk more accurately. A short panel will ground participants in the methodology and case for change, followed by a facilitated world café where tables work through the levers available to investors, policymakers, regulators, and data providers.

Register here

How Business is Meeting the Climate Resiliency Challenge: Impactful Risk Reduction and Worthwhile Investments

Hosted by: Columbia, London Business School Alumni of New York

Location: NEST Campus at Javitz Center

Climate change has shifted from theoretical risk to everyday reality — and businesses are still figuring out what that means for where and how they invest. Do you harden physical assets? Redesign for resilience? Buy insurance? Build internal capacity? The tradeoffs are real and the choices are urgent.

At this Columbia and London Business School Alumni Club of New York panel during Climate Week NYC, Lisa Sachs will moderate a discussion bringing together corporate risk executives, investors, and insurance experts to examine how organizations are actually responding — and what good decision-making on climate resilience looks like in practice. From front-line practitioners to academic and investor perspectives, the conversation will surface frameworks for making the business case for adaptation, and knowing when to act now versus later.

Register here

Financing Industrial Decarbonization in Emerging Markets

Hosted by: Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, UNIDO, and partners

Location: TBA

This convening is an invitation-only, moderated round table convening cement-sector leaders, financiers and governments to make the investment case for decarbonizing hard-to-abate industry, with cement as the proof point for a replicable, coherent financing architecture in emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs).

The hard-to-abate industry accounts for roughly one quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions; cement and concrete alone account for around 7 percent, yet decision-making is extraordinarily concentrated. The pace and magnitude of decarbonization required to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change cannot be met through incremental, project-by-project deployment. The strategy needs to involve the creation of a coherent ecosystem centred around building up local institutions (national development banks, commercial banks, fiscal authorities and established industry bodies), and deepening the domestic financial market.

More details coming soon

Transforming Energy Systems for Development: Lessons from Two Global Energy Alliance Portfolios

Hosted by: Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet

Location: Rockefeller Foundation

The session will explore case studies from Global Energy Alliance’s Powering Opportunity and Grids of the Future investment pillars, opening with a brief overview and results. Lisa Sachs will then join a panel discussion bringing together academic, climate finance, philanthropic, development bank, impact investing, and renewable energy company perspectives on the challenges and opportunities in driving private sector engagement to deliver energy systems transformation in low- and middle-income country settings, closing with open discussion.

RSVP here

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