In a technology sales strategy role she held before enrolling at Columbia Business School, Daniela Narimatsu ’26 found herself increasingly frustrated as she tried to sell ESG reporting products to a client base that often expressed interest in the solutions but not an actual willingness to pay for them.
“I started to ask myself, ‘How can I sell climate solutions and ensure they are successful in today’s market?’” Narimatsu says. “That was the biggest problem statement I had when I came to CBS.”
As a CBS MBA student, Narimatsu now has the opportunity to dive deeper into that question. She has undertaken a project to investigate the pre-consumer fashion waste supply chain, focusing on the relationship between three main stakeholders: brands, textile manufacturers, and recyclers. Her goal is to mock up a possible circular marketplace that connects the three so they can produce less waste.
On the strength of her project, Narimatsu was one of three current CBS students selected as 2025 ClimateCAP MBA Fellows. The distinction will enable them to dedicate 12 months to working on a climate-related project, with the opportunity to learn from academic advisors, attend the ClimateCAP Summit, and develop collaborative relationships with climate-driven MBA students from around the world. The ClimateCAP initiative is run by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the MBA Fellowship accepts an annual cohort of 16 students. This year, no school is represented by more ClimateCAP Fellows than CBS.
CBS is increasingly focusing more of its curriculum, extracurricular student resources, and faculty expertise on the intersection between business and climate change. As such, the school has attracted a growing share of students who, like Narimatsu and the other 2025 ClimateCAP Fellows, are devoted to understanding and tackling one of the greatest societal challenges of our time.
As a testament to this, CBS’s three ClimateCAP Fellows are each finding ways to leverage the tools of business and finance to address longstanding climate-related problems. In the process, they’re drawing lessons, expertise, and inspiration from the CBS community, from other schools across Columbia University, and from the varied and active opportunity landscape of New York City more broadly.
Climate as a Growing Student Interest
For ClimateCAP Fellow David Foye III ’25, the climate crisis came into a sharp focus after five years with the United States military, deploying to Afghanistan and returning to the US during COVID lockdowns.
“I really saw the systemic disorder that can come from being unprepared,” Foye says. He had long been interested in climate and had studied environmental engineering at the US Military Academy, which influenced his decision to enter the field with the goal of pushing systems to become more resilient to possible disaster. “It made me want to return to climate and to help make sure that we would be prepared for whatever the next thing would be,” he says.
Foye’s project is focused on improving tools to quantify climate risk and enhance liquidity in the secondary market for catastrophe (CAT) bonds. He believes that strengthening and simplifying this secondary market for investors will allow more capital to flow to the places where climate resilience and adaptation is needed most.
ClimateCAP Fellow Felipe Gatos ’26 decided to double down on big questions surrounding climate a bit later — after he began his studies at CBS, in fact.
“I got involved in CBS’s Green Business Club, and that’s really how I’ve learned more about the sector and started thinking about ways I could operate at that intersection of finance, strategy, and climate,” Gatos says.
Gatos, like Foye, is concerned about the gap in climate adaptation funding but is conceiving of a solution from a slightly different angle: He’s aiming to build a framework for a new, scalable investment vehicle blending public, donor, and private capital — with an eye toward making climate resilience an investable asset class for institutional investors. This will unlock greater funding for projects in this area, Gatos explains, particularly across the Global South.
CBS as an Incubator for Climate Solutions
Foye says his climate sights expanded once he joined CBS. He had initially come to business school to pursue entrepreneurship through acquisition, with the goal of purchasing heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning companies in the Southeast and making them more energy efficient. The plan had a climate thesis, but it was about to get much bigger.
“It was really with the faculty at Columbia, at the Tamer Institute, and with my fellow students that I was able to see that I could actually push innovation in the field,” Foye says.
He also drew inspiration and ideas from other schools at Columbia. Attending events hosted by Columbia’s LEAP (Learning the Earth with Artificial Intelligence and Physics) Center clued Foye into the cutting-edge tools that can be used to measure climate and predict its changes. He began to see how the CAT bond market could stand to benefit from these improved powers of prediction.
“That cross-disciplinary approach of going to events hosted by other schools at Columbia allowed me to cross wires and think outside the box,” Foye says.
Narimatsu’s education in fashion and circularity has ramped up quickly, thanks to her being both at CBS and in New York City. She heard the term circularity for the first time while participating in the CBS Green Business Club. With her classmates, she started attending events across the city focused on fashion tech and fashion circularity. “I started to realize that there’s a lot going on in this area; there are some very deep networks within the city of people working on this,” Narimatsu says. “I wanted to be involved in it. There’s something meaningful here to solve.”
Narimatsu took CBS’s Leading Sustainable Supply Chains class and has worked with Professor Nicole DeHoratius to better understand the state of circularity in retail in the early stages of her project.
A CBS class central to shaping Gatos’ project was Business and Climate Change with Professor Parinitha Sastry, whose scholarship on insurance offered critical guidance, he says. Another was Investing in Social Ventures, which connected Gatos with an expert from the Acumen Fund who offered helpful insight about structuring deals for investment in resilience in the Global South.
Looking to the Future
Gatos will be interning this summer with Bain & Company in the private equity group and is hoping to gain from the opportunity an even better understanding of fund strategy and investing in climate.
Foye’s ClimateCAP Fellowship project is already morphing into a startup called Phi.AI, which he is building alongside two of his peers at CBS. The mission of Phi.AI, he says, is to “bring both flow and balance to the CAT bond markets, helping to shift climate risk from insurers to the capital markets in order to prevent it from cascading onto homeowners or governments.”
Phi.AI team members recently pitched their startup at an AI impact competition hosted by CBS’s AI Club. They’ve also applied for the Columbia Startup Lab and expect to hear shortly whether they’ve been accepted into the latest cohort.
“I’m very new to the complexity of the climate crisis, and every week I learn something new on campus about climate tech,” she says. Narimatsu is uncovering through her ClimateCAP project that sustainability isn’t a product to be sold. Rather, it is the outcome of finding operational efficiencies in existing processes – such as the intricate supply chain required to produce a single piece of clothing – and reducing waste. This is the first piece of the puzzle in beginning to answer her initial question.
“Post-ClimateCAP, I hope I can have a framework to answer that question I had when I came to CBS and find ways to help make climate solutions competitive and have a scalable impact in our fight against climate change,” Narimatsu says.
