My Two Questions at The New York Climate Week 2026

Climate Week NYC is one of the best opportunities to take the temperature of the climate movement, read the weak signals, and anticipate what’s coming. For those who haven’t been: The city fills with hundreds of events, both public and private, and for the most ambitious attendees the week turns into a breathless race from one venue to another, in crowded subways and busy streets. Climate Week NYC is just like New York itself: an unapologetically chaotic but inspiring place that certainly surprises you. 

This year, I went to New York with a plan: I would ask everyone I meet – the person sitting next to me at an early breakfast session or the new acquaintance I just bumped into in a loud bar – two questions: What is different this year (if you attended in the previous years) and what new do you see emerging?  

Here is what I learned. 

First, the discussion has shifted from abstract concepts, ideas, and aspirations to tangible work. It’s practical and it’s about now, not the future. And it’s about the how, not the why. 

Second, there’s more emphasis on the local and the national. With the erosion of trust in international organizations and disillusionment with global frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals, the focus is now on efforts happening on a smaller scale and closer to home. Here, you see new pragmatism too. 

However, third, fewer people talk about climate. An advisory board member texted me – she had heard someone say: “No one talks about climate at climate week anymore.” I had noticed the same. If it’s a way to get things done, good, but changing the language has its dangers too. It distracts us from the real problem and the real goal, and it sacrifices accuracy. Yet I find it positive if climate gets embedded in broader conversations about societal change, since it has never been a separate issue. 

Fourth, there were those emerging themes, like carbon dioxide removal, increasingly recognized as an important part of the climate toolbox. Much less was spoken about solar radiation management and other climate intervention technologies – but we cover them in our Green and Bold Podcast. Unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence was everywhere. The New York Times article, published in the middle of the week, about whether AI might replace climate change as humanity’s main existential risk, gave me a pause. But AI and climate are inseparable in many ways, and it will be interesting to see how the discussion evolves.  

Fifth, regulation moves mountains (sometimes literally). I spoke with European heavy industry (mining, oil and gas) executives who wished for more regulation – it would give them market advantage, because they have so heavily invested in sustainability and climate. That same morning, over a breakfast that I attended, U.S. industry leaders had acknowledged the power of European and Californian regulation in forcing companies to make environmentally responsible business decisions. Sometimes regulatory pressure is the only remaining lever when businesses are walking away from their voluntary sustainability and climate commitments, and it leads to a virtuous domino effect along supply chains.  

One of the Climate Hub’s close friends, who has been coming to Climate Week for years now, had a more sinister view. To him, the week was just another superfluous annual gathering of a delusional elite, repeating itself and unable to recognize and respond to the changing world around them. I do agree with him that the climate movement needs to pause and ask why it hasn’t been more successful in recent years, and why it has missed momentum, not just in the United States but also elsewhere. At the start of the week, Dana Fisher and Katharine Hayhoe wrote in Time Magazine about the movement’s communication failure. It’s a must read, but I believe that a deeper diagnosis might be helpful. 

A partial – but certainly not the full – answer to this question about the reasons for failing to make climate a political and societal priority could come from the context in which the New York Climate Week was organized (and which explains why London Climate Week, or any other climate week for that matter, not even our wonderful climate week in Colorado, will never overshadow the week in Big Apple). Climate Week NYC coincides with the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) that brings the world leaders and their delegations to town. It’s impossible to participate in Climate Week without being reminded of how progress on climate change is tied to geopolitics. Those issues get entangled even if you didn’t end up in events (or parties!) with UNGA participants or weren’t held in traffic because of a passing convoy of a foreign leader.  

Browsing a Midtown bookstore, I picked up the new book of the Finnish President, Dr. Alexander Stubb, where he notes: “There are times in history when we understand that the world is changing but don’t yet know exactly where it is going. One look around the globe tells us we face such a moment now.” He lists the tattering of the rule-based world order, and the challenges to liberal democracy, international rules, and open trading system. Truth is dismissed; power vacuums open and fill. “[T]he risk of disruption and fragmentation runs high.”

Climate is part of that puzzle competing for our attention amidst these transitions, and among war, upheaval, and technological change. To make a convincing case for climate requires understanding how these different pieces fit together – and then clearly communicating how that complex bundle affects the lives of each and one of us.