Takeaways from Climate Week NYC 2024 (for those of us who didn’t make it)

Q1: It’s been a difficult year for India (and the world), climate crisis-wise. We need some good news first. What were the highlights of being at Climate Week this year? What made you feel good or hopeful about being there?

The India voice is growing stronger: Last year, there was a complete lack of India-focused voices at Climate Week. This year felt very different. The number of events at Climate Week nearly doubled from last year, going from around 400 to over 900, and many of these were geared around climate challenges in the Global South and South Asia. For example, our friends at Asia Philanthropy Circle and AVPN hosted incredible events about funding in the region, which we attended. This highlighted a clear need for collaboration between the Global North and Global South to advance on goals in vulnerable countries.

Need for urgency and speed clear: Sometimes, at conferences, people focus so much on deliberating and following processes, that the urgency of the crisis gets less weight than it should. This year, everyone was talking about urgency and the need for speed, and accelerated, transformative action. There was also huge recognition of resilience as a big climate goal, across themes like food and land-use, agriculture-energy nexus, just transition, etc. It was heartening to see that the timelines across rooms and priorities were also quite condensed.

Intention to align prominent: We really liked that people were talking about aligning with each other a lot. There was a lot of focus on sharing lessons across geographies, looking for alignment by exploring powerful/bold collaborations, building ecosystems, etc.

This was not limited to any single context, and people were discussing future travel and meeting arrangements to carry forward the intention to align beyond Climate Week.

Rising attention towards sub-national action: People were more curious to learn about regional needs and action this year and understand the conversation at sub-national levels across the Global South. This year’s Breakfast Briefing organised by the ICC and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation was more nuanced compared to last year’s event; our specific focus on sub-national action, over last year’s big picture perspective on broad trends in climate philanthropy, helped funders walk away with clear action pathways. We know the way forward is more focused topics, to allow nuanced takeaways for actors.

Q2: What do you think was missing or what needed more attention?

Conversations need to be more intersectional: We had the opportunity to represent the ICC in multiple rooms and spaces, spanning distributed renewable energy, Just Transition, urban resilience, food systems, etc. We noticed a clear absence of cross-cutting language; each issue or priority seemed self-contained in audience and problem framing. This cannot work with complex problems like climate change, which is, at its core, a systems change issue. For example, land-use experts needed to be in land-use, food, energy, JT rooms, but there was a stark contrast in the people representing different spaces. Diverse perspectives on each issue are always immensely helpful, and this can encourage civil society across the Global South to work together to create more nuanced solutions.