09.10pm ET
Day six, and the announcements kept coming.
The UK announced a £331 million funding package to tackle climate change and nature loss, including £330 million for the Global Environment Facility. The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures published new guidance for technology and communications companies on identifying, managing and disclosing their nature-related impacts and risks. UN Member States adopted a political declaration on sea-level rise, calling for stronger support for small island states and vulnerable coastal communities. And Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda joined the Blend Better Cement campaign, bringing the number of supporting governments to 12.
Across the city, Tuesday's conversation about why climate communications keeps failing came out as a podcast, Food Tank's Water and Blue Foods Summit made the case that almost every climate story is a water story, and in Brooklyn a vintage furniture store hop put the circular economy into four second-hand shops. The evening ended on Governors Island with the New York premiere of Songs of the Earth.
There's still more to come this weekend. Explore what's happening across the city.
Follow along. Keep up on LinkedIn and Instagram, and join the conversation with #ClimateWeekNYC.
09.00pm ET
With Climate Week drawing to a close, the evening ended on Governors Island with music.
Stony Brook University and LMCC marked the close of the week at LMCC's Arts Center with the New York premiere of Songs of the Earth, an original composition by Eugene Drucker, founding member of the Emerson String Quartet. It sets seven poems by Denise Levertov, a writer whose work turned on close observation of the physical world, water above all, and on a clear-eyed view of where humans sit in the natural order. The music moved from contemplative to mournful to violent, performed by Drucker with Roberta Cooper, Kevonna Shuford and Susannah Woodruff.
A panel followed, moderated by David Wrobel, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook, bringing together an artist working with bioart, an epidemiologist writing on climate-resilient health systems, an art historian researching seaweed, a sustainability researcher on food justice, the Deputy Director of the Climate Museum, and a writing lecturer working on community gardens.
After a week of panels and plenaries, the city closed the conversation with a concert. A good note to end on.
04.00pm ET
Asked by Garrison Hayes how you get more people to care about climate, including in the voting booth, Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York City, made the case for reframing it as something already happening rather than something coming.
For too long, he said, climate has been treated as a luxury concern, the thing you deal with once everything else is sorted. It isn't. It's an immediate crisis, and the job is explaining it in terms of day to day quality of life, and in what things cost. Not a bad storm or a wet summer, but the climate crisis.
His example was the flood wall planned for Lower Manhattan as part of the city's coastal resilience work. Talking to the engineers, he said, what struck him was that the wall doesn't only stop the water. It brings down insurance costs for the people living behind it. That's the connection worth making: this isn't a luxury concern, it's a primary one that already affects everyone, and the only question is how we respond, not whether.
"This is not a luxury concern. This is a primary concern that affects all of us already. It's just a question of how we respond to it, not if we respond to it."
Interview with Garrison Hayes for Mother Jones.
12.30pm ET
Tuesday's conversation at The Hub Live about why climate communications keeps failing is now out as a podcast. 50 Shades of Green returns with host Adam Lake, recorded live at Climate Week NYC, on how to talk about climate when the science is complex and the politics are loud.
Bernadette Woods Placky of the Talking Climate Collaborative treats weather as a shared language, because storms ignore party lines. Her advice is to aim at the ninety percent who already care rather than the ten percent doing the shouting. Hannah Safford of the Federation of American Scientists argues the label matters less than the substance, and that a story about solar in Arizona shouldn't sound like one about wind in New England. And Emma Stewart of Climate Spring, a scientist and former Netflix sustainability lead who calls herself a reformed scold, points out that most audiences want to see climate on screen and almost never do.
10.30am ET
Not all of Climate Week happens in a conference room. This afternoon a vintage furniture store hop runs across four Brooklyn shops: Again Vintage in Bed-Stuy, and Chyelle, Big Reuse and Brooklyn Vintage Company in Bushwick. Hosted by Home Swap Stories, it runs four things at once: a panel on second-hand furniture and sustainable living, a listening circle on climate anxiety, an upcycling workshop, and a video recording session.
The premise is one the week keeps arriving at from other directions: the greenest product is the one that already exists. Americans throw away around 12 million tons of furniture and furnishings a year, according to the EPA, a figure driven up by fast furniture built to last one lease rather than a lifetime. A scratched mid-century dresser needs no new logging, no shipping and no chemical glue.
The listening circle is the part worth noticing. Climate anxiety doesn't usually get a room of its own, and putting it next to the practical business of choosing a chair is a smarter piece of programming than it first appears.
Find it on the events calendar.
08.00am ET
Two days left, and the city is still going. We'll be covering selected events here throughout the day.
Find your own with the events map and the full calendar.
A few to look out for today
- Preparing for the Future: At the Water's Edge — Battery Park City Authority | 8.30am ET | What's at risk in Lower Manhattan, and what's being done to protect the subways, jobs and infrastructure behind 8% of the city's economy
- Brunch and Learn: How AI Can Help Investors Navigate Interconnected Sustainability Risks — US SIF | 9.00am ET| A first look at SAIL, an AI platform built to help investors see systemic risk rather than company-by-company performance
- Climate Comedy and Methane Myth-busting — Methane Mitigation Council | 10.00am ET | Comedian Stuart Goldsmith and methane experts on why cutting methane is the fastest way to slow warming. Thirty seats only
- Shakes and Cakes with Climate Friends — Streetlife Ventures and Climate Tech Cities | 12.00pm ET | No panels, no speeches. Milkshakes in Madison Square Park with people who have spent a week in conference rooms
- Big Oil, the Law, and the Fight for a Just Transition — Law Students for Climate Accountability | 3.00pm ET | Steven Donziger and climate journalist Amy Westervelt on litigation, retaliation and what a just transition demands
Joining from home?
Two hybrid events you can catch wherever you are:
- Powering Our Future: Young People Shaping North America's Energy Transition — Agora and the UN SDG7 Youth Constituency | 10.30am ET | A youth-led forum in the Bronx working toward a short list of energy priorities, with young people in the majority and doing the asking
- Circular Economy and Green Finance — STUF United Fund | 1.30pm ET | How circular economy solutions get financed, and what it takes to scale Asia-US net-zero partnerships