"New York Climate Week 2025: sustainability is still here to stay"

A year ago, in an opinion piece reflecting on New York Climate Week, my choice of headline was “sustainability is here to stay.” Well, it just so happens that the world has changed dramatically over these past 12 months, as we all know, and while it might seem otherwise, this year’s edition only served to reinforce that message, which in my view holds true today.

Featuring more than 1,000 events and 100,000 participants, New York Climate Week 2025 was the largest to date. While in 2024 I talked about sustainability as an evolving creature, right now I see it as being in full-blown transformation—sustainability as an overarching business imperative that is unstoppable.

Throughout the week, I was able to take in numerous sessions and meetings that helped me identify five deeply transformative dynamics.

The first of these is the shift from viewing climate action as simply “the right thing to do” to recognizing it as a strategic economic decision. This perspective reveals the tangible benefits of positive climate action for companies, such as lower energy costs, greater resilience, and enhanced risk management, thus aligning environmental management with economic interest. We talked at length with many leading companies over the course of the week, and came to the realization that this new approach is key to accelerating the uptake of sustainable practices. The common thread among all of them is viewing the here and now as an opportunity to strengthen their sustainable business strategies in a differential way and to treat sustainability as a potential competitive edge.

Second, I found that we must continue to invest heavily over the coming decades, and moreover across virtually all sectors. We now need to invest more than ever in energy generation, with a mix that succeeds in balancing decarbonization, security, and affordability. We need to invest in infrastructure; more precisely, in a more resilient grid able to support the electrification of our economy. We need to invest in innovation to transform production models in emissions-intensive industries.

“This is now more serious than ever, and stronger than ever"

And the financial sector has a key role to play in this relentless, and indeed unprecedented, global investment process. What we saw more than ever, is the importance of recalibrating the role of the banking sector in the transition. Expecting banks alone to lead climate action is profoundly shortsighted, as indeed the renowned energy research center RMI argued in its recent publication Recalibrating the Role of Banks in the Energy Transition. It is essential to incorporate the dependencies that shape every financial and business decision. For companies’ decarbonization investments to happen, they must make economic sense and be profitable. Technology and a predictable environment of energy and industrial policies are essential in this regard. Only in this way can the financial sector maximize the impact by playing a pivotal role in this transformation: enabling the mobilization of sustainable financing among businesses and households alike.

A fourth—and frankly encouraging—transformative dynamic we have been witnessing is the increasingly decentralized approach to tackling climate issues. Genuine progress is increasingly being made by cities, states, companies, financial institutions, and civil society, rather than solely by national governments. This distributed approach showcases the might of local, sectoral, and coalition initiatives in overcoming national paralysis and driving tangible change.

Last but not least, the event focused more heavily on resilience, adaptation, and nature as emerging business opportunities. ‘Blended finance’—which combines public and private capital for sustainable development—also garnered significant attention and rightly so. These areas represent new avenues for differentiation and innovation, offering promising pathways both for protecting the environment and for fostering economic growth.

In my view, we should embrace this transformation in sustainability as an opportunity, not as a concession. We are now entering a new era that calls for new reference frameworks, new business models, and renewed leadership if we are to succeed in building a more prosperous world for all.

As one business leader put it: “This is now more serious than ever, and stronger than ever. What I take away from New York Climate Week is a sense of great optimism, without reservation.” I happen to feel the same way.