Lisa Sachs
Lisa Sachs is the Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) at Columbia University’s Climate School, where she is also an Associate Professor and Director of the M.S. in Climate Finance program. She is a globally recognised expert on climate finance, sustainable investment and natural resource governance, and a leading voice on how laws, policies and financial architecture shape global investment flows in support of development and climate objectives.
Since joining CCSI in 2008, she has built the Center into a leading hub for research and policy engagement on the governance of extractive industries, land and agriculture investment and international investment law. Her work spans climate finance, energy transition financing, sustainable industrial policy and the governance of critical minerals. She advises governments, multilateral development banks and UN agencies around the world, and has overseen advisory work in countries including Mozambique, Guinea, Tanzania, Malawi, Namibia, Paraguay and Timor-Leste.
Sachs teaches a masters seminar at Columbia Law School and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs on Extractive Industries and Sustainable Development. She previously served as Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Mining and Metals and co-chairs the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s thematic group on the Good Governance of Extractive and Land Resources. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Harvard University and earned her Juris Doctor and a Master’s degree in International Affairs from Columbia University, where she was a James Kent Scholar.
Listen to hear Dominic Bowen in conversation with Lisa Sachs on why critical minerals have become the defining resource story of our time, why the resource curse persists even as demand for lithium, cobalt and rare earths explodes, and why she believes climate change and AI are less a matter of missing solutions than of a world not yet awake to the ones already in front of us.
