Published: October 11, 2023
Climate Week NYC was marked by a focus on implementing concrete solutions at speed, and the need for collaboration across silos to implement these solutions.
There is a growing understanding that solutions to climate change must also incorporate the role of nature, and we expect this emphasis on nature to continue at COP28.
At COP28, we also expect to see rising emphasis on credible and just transition plans that incorporate the needs and voices of diverse stakeholders.
Author
Lindsey Hall | Head of ESG Thought Leadership, S&P Global Sustainable1
Contributor
Esther Whieldon | Senior Writer, S&P Global Sustainable1
Climate Week NYC takes place in September each year alongside the UN General Assembly meeting, convening thousands of stakeholders for hundreds of events hosted across New York City with the goal of driving action to address the climate crisis.
Below, we summarize five key takeaways that emerged throughout the week, which we think will set the groundwork for COP28, the UN climate conference taking place in Dubai in late November and early December.
You can learn more about the event S&P Global is hosting at COP28 here.
In 2023, Climate Week NYC was marked by an overarching sense of momentum and increased energy relative to previous years. We observed this throughout events and in the conversations happening on stages and on the sidelines of events.
This was tempered by widespread recognition that stakeholders are not moving quickly enough to address the climate crisis. While thousands of campaigners marched in the streets of New York City calling for governments to put an end to fossil fuels usage, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the only US official invited to speak at the UN’s Climate Ambition Summit, reminded delegates that “this climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis” and called out the oil and gas industry for years of “deceit and denial.” Building consensus was challenging as many key developed countries did not attend the summit.
Throughout the week, stakeholders acknowledged that both the public and private sectors have a role to play. This meant there was a heightened focus on finding concrete solutions.
For example, at the start of Climate Week NYC, the UN Global Compact launched the “Forward Faster” initiative to accelerate private sector action to deliver on the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The initiative calls on business leaders to take measurable, credible and ambitious action around gender equality, climate action, living wage, water resilience, and finance and investment — areas where the UN Global Compact said the private sector can collectively make the biggest, fastest impact by 2030.
This sense of urgency was pervasive at Climate Week NYC and will be one of the prevailing topics at COP28.
Multiple stakeholders at Climate Week NYC said the technology is already here to help with climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. What is lacking is a pipeline of bankable projects.
As David Atkin, the CEO of Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), said in an interview for the "ESG Insider" podcast from S&P Global Sustainable1, "The public sector and the private sector need to work together. But you need to have companies who've got [research and development] budgets that are creating technological innovation that investors can get behind and provide the capital."
"That can only happen at a scale if public sector comes to the party and provides the right policy settings but also creating the right project pipeline,” Atkin said.
And there were calls for policymakers and the private sector to work together. As Christopher Creed, chief investment officer of the US Energy Department's Loan Programs Office, put it: "This transition is going to be private sector-led and government enabled.”
The US Inflation Reduction Act is one such enabling mechanism that was cited throughout Climate Week NYC as an example of how the federal government can help catalyze change. An announcement by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen about voluntary principles for net-zero financing and investment for financial institutions likewise garnered much attention. Yellen said the principles encourage institutions to include clear practices, targets and metrics in their net-zero transition plans, and she called on institutions to "support their clients and portfolio companies in adopting their own transition plans."
Other signs of government support include California's legislation that would require some companies operating in the state to report their greenhouse gas emissions, which would make California the first US state to mandate emissions reporting.
Companies also talked about the need to work together. Business leaders from a variety of sectors stressed the importance of sharing supply chain data and sustainability best practices with peers. The finance community, economists and climate scientists underscored why collaboration is key to finding a common language to deal with the climate crisis.
One of the biggest areas of focus during Climate Week NYC was on the growing understanding of the importance of nature-based solutions in addressing climate change.
The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) released its long-awaited final recommendations at Climate Week NYC. The recommendations are intended to guide companies in disclosing their dependencies and impacts on nature. They cover topics such as management’s role in assessing nature-related risks, the material effects of nature on a company’s strategy, and how a firm can identify nature-related risks and opportunities in its business. The TNFD also said it would track voluntary adoption of its framework through an annual status report as of 2024.
At Climate Week NYC another question in focus was about how to put a value on nature. That means understanding how companies impact nature and how they depend on the ecosystem services nature provides. To put a dollar figure behind that idea, 55% of global GDP is moderately or highly dependent on nature, according to an analysis PwC released in April, and that is equivalent to an estimated $58 trillion.
Despite the fact that nature underpins much of the global economy, research from S&P Global Sustainable1 indicates that protecting nature is a nascent priority for many companies. Only about one-third of Europe's biggest companies have set biodiversity or deforestation targets while adoption rates are even lower among the largest companies in Asia-Pacific and the US.
The landscape for climate and nature data is changing as investors and stakeholders around the world have clamored for more consistent and comparable climate-related data and disclosures. And as nature takes on more importance in investors’ minds, demand for nature-related data is increasing. In June, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) responded to investors by issuing its first two sustainability disclosure standards.
As ISSB Vice Chair Sue Lloyd said in a Climate Week NYC session hosted by S&P Global Sustainable1, the problem is not a lack of information; there is actually a proliferation of data, and the ISSB is working to reduce the complexity of the landscape while also consulting the market to decide where to focus its efforts next. Biodiversity could be one of its next areas of focus.
At Climate Week NYC companies acknowledged that this changing landscape can be challenging. For example, some companies reported difficulty measuring and managing the Scope 3 emissions that occur up and down their supply chains.
We also observed discussion of the steps companies can take to continue improving data collection on climate and nature. For example, John Adler, chief ESG officer in the NYC Office of the Comptroller, suggested that for Scope 3 emissions, companies start by disclosing what is most material to them instead of all 15 categories of those emissions.
We observed several versions of a sentiment voiced by Ingrid Reumert, senior vice president for group stakeholder relations at renewable energy company Ørsted. “Accept it’s imperfect; try to have the biggest impact,” Reumert said during a panel about the evolution of nature-related data.
Technological innovation, policy, regulation and the private sector can all play an important role in the transition to a low-carbon economy — and so can individual actors. The physical impacts of climate change could have stark impacts on individuals and communities, and during Climate Week NYC there were many discussions about the importance of considering the impacts on all stakeholders in credible transition plans.
Some Climate Week participants pushed to reframe climate change and nature loss as a global health crisis. Participants also highlighted the role that consumer and investor demands play in driving corporate decision-making and the role that taxpayers may play in spurring government action.
"We often think of the energy transition of climate action as top-down, big international negotiations. But when you bring it closer to people, you make people the agents of change,” said Arunabha Ghosh, founder and CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water and a member of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. Ghosh noted that the market for using distributed renewables for clean energy-driven livelihood activities in rural India alone is $50 billion.
"To capture that kind of market, you've got to make not one entrepreneur, not 10 entrepreneurs, but millions of entrepreneurs,” Ghosh said during the Sustainable Investment Forum on Sept. 19. “Our estimation is this will be driven by 37 million micro entrepreneurs.”
Business leaders across sectors talked about steps they are taking to understand how climate change is impacting the communities where they do business and how they are working with those stakeholders in forming their transition strategies.
“We recognize that places where there tends to be a disproportionate effect from climate emissions from carbon emissions, and water, whether it's usage or quality or availability, we tend to recognize that those tend to be the communities that are otherwise disadvantaged as well,” Gayle Schueller, 3M's senior vice president and chief sustainability officer, said in an interview with S&P Global Sustainable1 about how the technology and manufacturing company is engaging with the communities where it operates.
