Strengthening Urban Climate Leadership One Conversation at a Time
Sol Reiman, a YSE 1st year graduate student from Argentina, and Carlo Angeles, a YSE Urban Climate Leadership Fellow from Peru, connect over shared ambitions in climate and biodiversity finance
Cities are at the front lines of climate change — and so are the people working to make them more resilient. For practitioners doing this work, it helps to know they're not alone — to be part of a community of peers facing the same challenges and learning from each other. The Yale School of the Environment (YSE) Urban Climate Leadership (UCL) Certificate Program, developed with support from the Three Cairns Group, brings together mid-career planners, policymakers, and sustainability leaders from around the world — with a particular focus on practitioners from the Global South — for a rigorous online program exploring challenges and solutions at the intersection of cities and climate.
One of the program’s quieter benefits is the network it creates: a global community of working professionals that YSE’s residential graduate students can tap into through near-peer exchanges — conversations that connect students with practitioners from their own regions or working on topics of shared interest.
Earlier this year, Sol Reiman, a YSE master’s student from Argentina, sat down (virtually) with Carlo Angeles, a Three Cairns Group Fellow and member of the 2026 UCL Certificate Program cohort. Angeles is Director of Impact at C Minds, where he works on advancing biodiversity conservation by rethinking how cities value nature across Latin America and beyond. He is also an Inaugural Fellow of the Science Panel for the Amazon and a member of Peru’s National Climate Change Commission (Ministerio del Ambiente – Perú). The two spoke about the path ahead and the state of the climate and biodiversity finance ecosystem in their part of the world. Below are highlights from their conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Q: What’s your best advice for a student trying to make the most of their time at a school like Yale?
Carlo Angeles: Don’t lose sight of the relationships you build during the program. Some of the people you meet may become collaborators, mentors, friends, or simply trusted peers whose perspectives you continue to learn from for years to come. Those relationships often end up being one of the most meaningful parts of experiences like this.
I’d also suggest reaching out to the Yale World Fellows and Emerging Climate Leaders program: many Fellows work directly on biodiversity issues, and they are doing some truly inspiring work across conservation, finance, policy, and innovation. And don’t overlook the informal spaces — conferences, panels, even cocktail events. That’s often where unexpected opportunities, collaborations, and lasting relationships begin.
Q: Where do you see opportunities for emerging professionals in climate and biodiversity finance?
Carlo Angeles: Climate finance is already the most established market in sustainable finance. It has a mature ecosystem and extensive literature. Biodiversity finance is a different story. It’s smaller today, but it’s still being written, and it’s projected to grow significantly in the years ahead. There’s real room to actively help shape it.
Q: There seems to be broad agreement that cities are central to climate action. Is investment following that consensus?
Carlo Angeles: Not yet. Narratively, the urban issue is growing a lot — it’s already mainstream that urban is fundamental — but financially, it’s massively neglected. That’s true even at the established institutions — large investments simply aren’t reaching urban or subnational projects. It’s a big challenge, but that gap is also a big opportunity for anyone prepared to work on closing it.
Sol Reiman: That’s something I’ve also noticed from the outside — the climate and biodiversity finance market has very little urban focus. There’s some subnational finance, more on the adaptation side, but I keep wondering how much that’s going to grow, and what it would take to unlock more of it.
Q: Are there financing mechanisms that are actually working for cities today?
Carlo Angeles: Technical cooperation grants — typically half a million to five million dollars — are, in my experience, the most accessible and viable mechanism currently open to local governments beyond philanthropic capital. Most debt financing must flow through national governments first, which can limit direct access at the local level. There’s real appetite at both levels of government. What I have seen far less of is those cooperation grants being executed directly by a local government or a network of local governments which, to me, looks like an untapped opportunity.
Q: Sol, what did you take away from the conversation?
Sol Reiman: Speaking with Carlo was a valuable opportunity to better understand the professional ecosystem in Latin America and internationally, and to validate my own interpretation of the challenges in unlocking financing for climate resilience — a shared interest we discovered during our conversation. Identifying and understanding these challenges is highly motivating for me, and we plan to stay connected!