Published: October 11, 2024
Climate Week NYC takes place every September alongside the UN General Assembly (UNGA). In 2024, thousands of stakeholders from the public and private sectors convened Sept. 22-29 for more than 900 climate events across New York City.
Climate Week events covered 10 broad themes: energy, environmental justice, finance, food, health, heavy industry, nature, policy, sustainable living and transport. The week set the scene for many of the discussions that will take place throughout a busy fall season of sustainability events. Below, we outline five big ideas we expect to carry through from Climate Week NYC to COP16, the UN Biodiversity Conference in Colombia in October, and COP29, the UN Climate Change Conference taking place in Azerbaijan in November.
Scaling climate and clean energy financing was a major focus of Climate Week NYC. Many investors are looking to build on the hundreds of billions of dollars that have already flowed into clean energy, spurred on by government incentives (such as the US Inflation Reduction Act) and steep cost declines, to deliver the trillions of dollars ultimately needed for energy transition investments.
“Energy transition investments” encompass a wide swath of technologies, and not all are benefiting equally from this surge in clean energy funding. Energy transition financiers point to continued challenges in finding investors for solutions in hard-to-abate sectors, namely low-carbon hydrogen and carbon capture, utilization and storage.
Discussions at Climate Week NYC also focused on how blended finance could be leveraged to scale up climate investments and help to bridge the growing climate finance gap in developing countries. Blended finance pools public sector or philanthropic funds together with private sector capital. The spotlight was also on the standardization and comparability of adaptation and resilience investments, to mobilize finance in an area that has attracted less private sector interest. One example of this was the launch of the Climate Bond Initiative’s Resilience Taxonomy, which aims to provide greater clarity on the definition of adaptation and resilience activities, with the goal of increasing transparency and, ultimately, confidence for investors.
Still, many stakeholders are calling for much stronger investment in both transition finance and adaptation and resilience finance. We expect the role of public and private finance to feature prominently at COP29 in November, with focus on delivery of global climate finance goals. We heard throughout the week that COP29 will be “the finance COP.”
Carbon markets are one channel for climate and clean energy finance. However, voluntary carbon markets have been facing a crisis of confidence, and Climate Week NYC saw considerable debate regarding what steps are needed to reinvigorate demand and allow investment in emissions reductions projects to flow. Details around the operationalization of international carbon trading under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement on climate change have not been settled — but there is hope after Climate Week that differences may be bridged, leading to an agreement at COP29.
At Climate Week many discussions focused on the links between nature loss and climate change. There was recognition that the world needs to protect and restore nature in order to address global warming.
This builds on the momentum of recent years as investors, companies, standard setters and regulators have continued to put more emphasis on biodiversity. Many Climate Week discussions set the stage for the upcoming COP16 biodiversity conference taking place in Cali, Colombia Oct. 21-Nov. 1. Two years have passed since the last UN biodiversity conference, COP15 in Montreal in December 2022, where the private sector had a strong presence and negotiators agreed to the landmark Global Biodiversity Framework. This includes nearly two dozen targets, with a headline “30x30” commitment that pledges to protect 30% of the Earth's land and water considered important for biodiversity by 2030. Delegates also agreed to identify and eliminate, phase out or reform incentives, including subsidies that are harmful to biodiversity, by 2025. And importantly, the framework includes monetary targets, specifically to increase the level of financial resources to implement national biodiversity strategies and action plans by 2030 mobilizing at least $200 billion annually.
At Climate Week, sustainable food systems were a bigger focus than in previous years, combining concerns about physical climate risk and nature. There was also acknowledgment of the need to change economic incentives to better recognize the value of ecosystems and the services they provide. Many companies are beginning to understand how they depend on nature in their operations and supply chains. There is also increasing recognition that protecting and restoring nature can be a cost-effective way for companies to meet their climate strategies — for example, through nature-based solutions, which are actions to restore and protect ecosystems and sustainably manage them to address societal challenges.
Climate Week underscored the importance of an equitable transition that accounts for the needs of diverse stakeholders, including local communities, workers and Indigenous peoples. During this year's UNGA general debate, a key focus was on increasing financial assistance to developing countries, which are disproportionately affected by climate change and burdened by high debt levels. Calls for global cooperation, sustainable development, and reforming international financial systems to better support climate initiatives were central to the discussions.
The UN Summit of the Future that took place at the start of Climate Week aimed to strengthen multilateralism and international cooperation, culminating in the adoption of the Pact for the Future. The pact focused on five key areas: sustainable development, finance, peace and security, youth engagement and global governance reform. However, it made no new commitments, instead reaffirming existing COP28 commitments to phase down coal, transition away from fossil fuels, and triple global renewable capacity. It also reinforced a commitment to establish a new collective financing goal for developing countries at COP29.
Focus on the importance of knowledge sharing and long-term goal setting was heightened this year amid growing geopolitical uncertainty. In 2024, Climate Week brought increased emphasis on the role policy plays in achieving climate targets and driving private capital to where it is most needed. Representatives from the US Department of Energy at Climate Week discussed how the energy transition can be government enabled and private sector led, for example by using money from the US Inflation Reduction Act to buy down risk to the point where the private sector can step in.
In corporate events across the city, there was also a focus on the importance of collaborating across silos. We heard examples of climate scientists working across disciplines with economists; nonprofits convening competing companies to share data and best practices; and private sector companies collaborating with government to drive technological innovation and upskill future generations of workers for the green job opportunities that will accompany the transition to a low-carbon economy.
AI continued to generate buzz at Climate Week NYC as many forums touted the technology as an enabler of sustainable outcomes. Generative AI is also driving a rapid increase in electricity demand, and raising environmental, social and governance concerns. Data centers have the potential to crowd out other users and raise costs for communities that can least afford it.
Some companies are developing specialized hardware that allows for more efficient computing, and as models become smarter and optimized over time could reduce how much energy they require.
Large-scale increases in electricity demand are expected in other areas. The electrification of transport and heating and the need to help developing world populations emerge from energy poverty are driving already-record levels of electricity demand. This will necessitate new and clean generating capacity, but that will also put strain on the infrastructure that is needed to support it.
A potential revival of nuclear power was in many conversations, well beyond official presentations on program agendas. This followed the announcement on the eve of Climate Week of Microsoft’s plans to purchase power from restarting the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Baseload demand load profiles of data centers combined with the tech giants’ net-zero (and even net negative) climate goals could favor nuclear vs. more intermittent clean power sources. At Climate Week, 14 key financial institutions announced their openness to being involved in financing to support the target set at COP28 by 25 countries to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050.
With COP28 having already set out global targets for renewables, the importance of new goals to drive increased investments in transmission, battery and other storage as well as the grid capacity to complement the uptake of intermittent renewables and ensure emissions-free power is coming to the fore.
The evolving role of corporate sustainability reporting and disclosure was in the spotlight throughout Climate Week. In recent years many companies have set net-zero goals or climate strategies, and as investors become increasingly sophisticated many are now calling for greater transparency and more detailed information to assess whether a company is taking sufficient actions to deliver on its targets.
The rising emphasis on nature at Climate Week extended to corporate target-setting and disclosure as well. While some companies are setting targets to protect biodiversity or address deforestation, many are only in the early stages of doing so.
In New York, many discussions centered around the way the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) has changed the disclosure landscape since launching its first two sustainability-related standards in June 2023. Jurisdictions around the world have stated their intention to adopt the standards or align reporting frameworks with them, and in New York we heard how other organizations like CDP are aligning their work with that of the ISSB and rules like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), while also putting increasing emphasis on nature.
At Climate Week last year, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) launched its recommendations for nature-related risk management and disclosure, building on the work of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). And the ISSB is now researching disclosure about risks and opportunities associated with biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem services — a topic that will be in focus at COP16.
