What Is Climate Week?

This September, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) will gridlock New York City. So will Climate Week. Claiming to be the largest of its kind, the annual convocation of climate activists, scientists, academics, and business and political leaders is scheduled to coincide with the meeting of world leaders. Their goal is to spur greater action on climate change, despite mixed results.

What is UN Climate Week?

Climate Week, which will be held from September 22 to September 29, was first launched in 2009 at New York’s Morgan Library to prepare negotiators for the annual UN-sponsored climate convening, the Conference of the Parties (COP). The event lacks the UNGA’s formality, insistence on protocol, and entrenched bureaucracy, offering instead some six hundred events and activities aimed at climate action. 

Today, fifteen years on, Climate Week has ballooned into a networking extravaganza, attracting elected leaders, business titans, professors, tech entrepreneurs, and nongovernmental organizations from across the world. The event offers participants the opportunity to mingle with climate luminaries such as John Kerry, Al Gore, and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, to knit new partnerships, discover emerging technologies, and connect with philanthropies. 

Last year, approximately 6,500 people representing almost 100 countries attended. In conjunction with the official program, businesses and civil society host invitation-only roundtables, dinners, “fireside chats,” and workshops across New York’s five boroughs. Along the way, a laundry list of government and corporate commitments and reports are also released. 

Organizers and attendees have called it the “Burning Man for climate geeks” and the “Davos of climate.” Others have likened it to Fashion Week and even a coral reef, serving as the backdrop to a multitude of small and large events across the city. Whether it will yield measurable progress on climate remains an open question. Despite all the Climate Week activities—the awards, speeches, panels, commitments, and even protests—the planet remains on course for catastrophic heating.

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UN Climate Talks

1992–2023

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What’s on this year’s agenda?

Climate Week’s organizers chose “It’s Time” for this year’s theme, underscoring the urgency for climate investment and action. Taking up more space on the official agenda is the role of artificial intelligence in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and assisting communities in adapting to the effects of a changing climate. Business and government leaders will likely aim to showcase climate initiatives, locate potential partners, and influence policy discussions taking place at the adjacent UNGA meetings, among other goals.  

Not on the official agenda, but a powerful undercurrent nonetheless, is the outcome of November’s presidential election in the United States. Because the country is the world’s largest historical emitter and second-largest current emitter, the U.S. government’s climate action (or lack of it) matters to the world when it comes to temperature rise. The two presidential candidates hold divergent views on climate. Former President Donald Trump has declared climate change a hoax and previously withdrew the United States from the UN Paris Climate Agreement. Vice President Kamala Harris has a history of supporting climate action. Notably, she cast the decisive vote in Congress for the Inflation Reduction Act, widely considered the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history.

Climate Week also serves as a preview and precursor to the priorities for the upcoming COP29 conference, which will be hosted by Azerbaijan in November. It is the UN’s twenty-ninth such meeting and the third COP in a row held in a fossil-fuel-dependent country. At COP29, nations will reengage on issues including financial assistance for developing countries and ratcheting up ambition to slow greenhouse gas emissions. 

Why does Climate Week matter?

The same questions gnawing at the COP process also loom over Climate Week: How much do these mass convenings truly accomplish? How many of the commitments yield meaningful results? Do the outcomes justify the carbon emissions generated by participants’ international travel? To be sure, the global community has succeeded in bending the emissions curve downward. But that curve needs to plunge downward much faster to avoid the gravest effects of global warming. 

Climate change—caused primarily by human activity—toppled records across the globe last year. According to the American Meteorological Society’s annual State of the Climate report [PDF], 2023 broke records for the highest surface temperatures to date. The last nine years were the nine warmest since recordkeeping began. Last year, almost 50 percent of the world’s population experienced thirty or more days of hot temperatures that climate change made at least three times more likely. 

Climate change is a threat multiplier, reaping record-breaking losses and damages worldwide. Last year not only brought the highest number of heat-related deaths in forty-five years of recorded history, but also witnessed the highest number of climate and extreme weather disasters costing upwards of one billion dollars each in the United States. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that 2023 had twenty-eight such disasters, an unprecedented tally in a single year. According to the global reinsurance company Swiss Re, the related property losses could increase by more than 60 percent by 2040. S&P Global Ratings predicts that physical risks [PDF] from climate change could threaten more than a 4 percent loss in world gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050.  

According to the science group Global Carbon Budget, carbon emissions climbed to record levels in 2023. The atmospheric levels of carbon, as measured at NOAA’s mile-high Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, reached levels likely not seen in three million years, when sea levels were much higher. Meanwhile, Wall Street institutions have backed away from climate commitments and regional banks have stepped up lending to fossil fuels. 

If Climate Week is indeed akin to Burning Man, last year’s Burning Man could serve as a warning. So much rain fell on the event that officials advised attendees to “turn around and head home” to avoid the flooding. That advice echoes the National Weather Service's “Turn Around, Don't Drown” flood advisory campaign, one of many efforts aimed at keeping people safe during unfamiliar extreme weather. Unless governments and businesses can reduce atmospheric pollution rapidly, everyone will be searching for safety in the hotter, wilder world that climate change creates.