Franklin University Switzerland is happy to welcome selected high school students (aged 15-18) to join our summer program in "Sustainability, Eco-Resilience, and Climate Justice". This unique educational experience offers the chance to earn university credit while exploring critical global issues in an engaging and immersive environment.

Climate change presents a risk to the global economy and consequently the finance sector. However, it also presents an opportunity for innovative financing to increase the economic and social resilience to climate impacts. As facilitators of the economy, financial institutions have a central role in the transformation to low carbon and climate-resilient development. Their responsibility is twofold: greening their portfolios towards Paris compatible financing and investments, and reflecting and integrating climate-related risks into their risk management processes. This gradual process involves harmonizing short-term business cycles and investment horizons with systemic and long-term thinking by all actors from the financial sector (e.g. banks, asset managers, insurers, pension funds, investment consultants, regulators, rating agencies). This process is supported by public actors who moderate the structural change required for a transition to climate-resilient economies. This course provides the basics of finance and investment for assessing the financial viability of investments in adaptation projects. It clusters business models to provide an understanding of the parameters according to the project scale and, for example, revenue models, ownership structure, and value proposition, and will link to the financing perspective. Different investors and intermediaries have very different investment strategies, levels of risk appetite, return expectations, and investment horizons. Crowding in the right investor for a project is essential to ensure their long-term involvement and the required scale-up of investment volumes.

We will examine different approaches for coping with climate change: international agreements, market-based solutions, civil-society and corporate actions

We live in uncertain times. The favorable climate that humanity has known is rapidly changing, with far-reaching implications for human behavior and health. It’s increasingly critical to build preparedness for direct – and indirect – climate impacts and to welcome uncertainty into the design process. How do we explore and imagine possible pathways to increase our resilience and capacity to adapt? This workshop will explore these questions and help build an understanding of the trajectories, impacts, and influences of climate change.