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Why businesses are leaning in at Climate Week NYC 2025
In this episode of Sustainability Matters, we ask: what was fueling climate action at Climate Week NYC 2025? From AI to nature, discover bold ideas and real solutions reshaping sustainability across sectors.
What happens when over a thousand climate-focused events converge in one city? At Climate Week NYC 2025, the private sector showed up in force, bringing bold ideas, collaborative energy and a clear shift from strategy to delivery. In this episode of Sustainability Matters, host Matthew Bell shares insights from leaders across various industries — utilities, consumer goods, technology and agriculture — as well as NGOs interviewed on the sidelines of EY-hosted events.
Hear how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming sustainability efforts, enabling smarter and faster decisions in the race against time. Discover why nature is no longer just an ethical concern but a material business priority. Learn how cross-sector partnerships are unlocking regenerative practices and reshaping supply chains.
From boardroom strategies to landscape-level collaboration, this episode captures the pulse of NY Climate Week and the momentum building toward the upcoming COP30 in Brazil.
Key takeaways:
Collaboration and cross-sector partnerships can unlock scalable climate and nature solutions, especially in agriculture and energy.
Nature is now strategic, and businesses are integrating nature into core operations for resilience and profitability.
From predictive analytics to emissions reduction, AI is accelerating sustainability with speed and precision.
For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.
Matthew Bell
From Wall Street to the world, the climate conversation increasingly is no longer a side note; it's becoming the headline. At the 2025 Climate Week New York City, the buzz was unmistakable. Action is accelerating — the private sector stepping up. AI, collaborations and nature dominated the dialogue though. And with COP30 in Brazil just around the corner, the stakes and the opportunities have never been higher.
Heather Rock
This is the event to go to every year in the US, and everyone who's committed to how are we going to mitigate and adapt to climate change comes here.
Dominic Waughray
It feels very much about getting it done.
Marco Lambertini
We need to fix it now, not tomorrow, because tomorrow may be too late.
Bell
Hello, and welcome to the EY Sustainability Matters podcast, our regular look at the sustainability topics reshaping the world around us and how they impact businesses around the globe. I'm Matt Bell, Global EY Climate Change and Sustainability Services Leader, and your host for this episode. Today, we're looking at the 2025 Climate Week in New York City. It's a global convergence of CEOs, chief sustainability officers, as well as scientists, activists, and of course, policymakers, who all focused on one thing:
How do we accelerate action on climate and now on nature?
We're bringing you this episode from the sidelines of EY-hosted events, where we spoke with leaders across consumer goods, utilities, technology and NGOs to capture the pulse of what's driving this change. And this year, well, surprisingly, it was bigger than ever. To kick things off, here's Jonathan Pershing, program director for environment at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, on just how far this conversation has come.
Jonathan Pershing
I'm part of the Climate Group community, which sets up these events, and they told me there were 1,000 events this year, in contrast with previous highs of less than 800. That's got the largest number of events that we've ever had. So, the fact is that it's so big, I think, says something very interesting about the moment that people are not walking away from the agenda.
They're not backing away from the issue. They're showing up in significant numbers here. And the implementation agenda has really taken people's imagination. They're really excited about it. It means investment. It means projects. It means a set of things in communities. It means operational activities. I think more and more we're moving to a place where the ideas are now commercial. They're available at a price you can afford, as opposed to being imagined at some future generation. So, that's new.
Bell
Despite a sense that there's regulatory uncertainty around the world, and of course, especially in the US, we are finding that many companies are actually leaning in with more optimism and are energized by the momentum that's coming out of Climate Week. For those deeply committed to climate action, this annual gathering has become the go-to space for connecting, inspiring and taking forward-looking ideas.
Rock
My name is Heather Rock. I lead strategy for Pacific Gas and Electric Company. We are a combined electric and gas utility. We serve 16 million customers in Central and Northern California. This is the event to go to every year in the US, and everyone who's committed to and engaged in how are we going to mitigate and adapt to climate change comes here. It's a place where you get to walk about six miles every day, you don't sleep, and most importantly, get a lot of inspiration and ideas from the folks that you meet.
It's clear that things are changing at the US federal level. And it's clear that we face some new headwinds in the climate and energy space that we didn't maybe a year ago. I think there's a huge opportunity here for how we partner together and how we innovate together in order to meet all of our energy demands in the most affordable, reliable and clean way possible.
Bell
Perhaps one of the most notable shifts at this year's Climate Week was the emphasis on action — tangible progress. Despite the uncertainty that still surrounds some sustainability initiatives, the conversation has moved beyond identifying the problem to try to solve it. Dominic Waughray, from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, shares how this shift is resonating at the board level, where implementation and value creation are now front and center.
Waughray
It feels very much about getting it done. Previous climate weeks and necessarily so being like, “Here's the scale of the problem and here's why this is a risk, and then somebody should do something. And here's my report on the size of that challenge.” And I think there's a little bit less of that. And that's pretty good because that takes us into business delivery, business value-creation territory, which the board would understand. The bold move is to lean in over the next three to five years.
And if you have quarterly boardroom meetings — five years, four meetings a year, 20 boardroom meetings, so, you can always create like kind of sprints or steps that you bite off the piece of the puzzle between this board meeting and the next board meeting. And I think that really gets us into the rhythm of making this thing happen in a way that works also with the business community.
And if we can build an action plan like that — I think that's a bold move from all of those players involved because it's taking us from commitment into implementation. And why it's bold is because some of this will work, and some of it will be an experiment. And we will learn from the experimentation and then be able to focus on the things that work.
Oftentimes, when people talk about supply chains, they focus on the commodity — palm oil, soy, sourcing my coffee or iron or steel. Sometimes, you don't have to focus on the commodity. You can just look at bits of the value chain. So, for example, energy use — doesn't matter what the commodity is, but all the way along the how do I optimize energy use. Then suddenly there's a win there in terms of lower energy costs and lower emissions.
So, they're not necessarily the commodity per se of the value chain, but they are common. And the cool thing about that is those pieces are in every value chain. So, you get it right in one; you can replicate, like I was saying before, you get a win — we'll get a win and we'll build confidence. And that will be like a feedback loop of accelerating the approach.
Bell
Indeed, Dominic's call for bold, iterative action can remind us that real progress happens when businesses move from pledges to delivery and do so in a way that aligns with how boardrooms actually operate. And we need this. We know that greenhouse gas emissions at a global scale continue to rise, and they'll need to dramatically fall, if we're to have the climate impacts that we need.
But we know that making these shifts isn't something that companies are able to do on their own. Collaboration is key, especially in sectors where shared resources and common goals create natural opportunities for partnership. Chris Simoglou from PepsiCo shares how his team is working across the industry to drive regenerative practices and unlock collective impact.
Chris Simoglou
My name is Chris Simoglou. I work at PepsiCo and our North America Sustainability team. Our team covers full sustainability agenda in North America — everything from how we grow products, how we make our products, move them and then how we sell our products across North America.
Climate policy and incentives certainly play a role. I think where that landscape changes, it only opens up greater opportunities for collaborative action across different companies. And when our company joins forces with others that have similar objectives, we find that it's easier to often go together toward those objectives versus separately and working them apart.
I think the biggest opportunity cross-sector is in the agricultural space. You know, in many cases, we all rely on the same land, the same agricultural commodities to make our products, where we can collaborate to make sure that those agricultural lands, there's soil health, that we're reducing emissions from agricultural practices that benefits the entire food system.
And they think that's where we've been partnering very closely with a number of different companies that are our suppliers, but also suppliers to others to really expand our regenerative agriculture practices in the United States.
Bell
Chris's point about shared agricultural landscape highlights just how interconnected sustainability efforts really are. And the spirit of collaboration, especially when it comes to protecting nature, was echoed by one of the leading voices in that space: Ex-CEO of WWF and now the head of the Nature Positive Initiative, Marco Lambertini reminds us that nature is local, and preserving it requires cross-sector partnership at the landscape level.
Marco
The biggest opportunity for cross-sector collaboration is related to the biggest benefits they will derive from that cross-sector collaboration. To a large extent, contrary to climate, nature is local. Nature is in places. And so, cross-sector collaboration on nature means working at the landscape level, the seascape level, between different actors and by addressing together the root causes of nature loss and the consistent destabilization.
Probably the most obvious intuitive example is water. You know, whatever you are in agriculture — a forestry, a manufacturing company operating the landscape — you need to guarantee that the landscape provides access to water — good quality water — for your operations. And the only way to do that is to preserve the ability of the landscape to provide a service because water doesn't come from the tap, water comes from nature. And so, protecting nature guarantees the access to water that is fundamental to so many sectors. So, that's, for me, the exciting dimension of concentric collaboration for nature is the landscape and the seascape level.
Bell
If there was one word that echoed through nearly every conversation this year, it was indeed AI. From its growing resource demands to its potential to unlock smarter climate nature solutions, AI was front and center. At EY, we hosted the first ever EY and AI Sustainability Exchange, a lively debate on whether AI can truly do nature's work.
The insights were too good not to share, so stay tuned for a special podcast for nature later in this year and the role that AI will play. In the meantime, here's Chris Simoglou again from PepsiCo, reflecting on how AI is helping his team tackle climate challenges with greater speed and precision.
Simoglou
I think AI only makes us smarter. And AI is an opportunity to take vast amounts of climate data, vast amounts of consumer data and process it in a way to generate insights that will enable us to optimize how we attack various climate problems. Resources aren't limitless, and I think we see that of our company, the toughest challenge is time.
Time for action is really diminishing and dwindling really quickly. We have to make sure that we focus on those opportunities, both from an investment and a time perspective in order to yield the greatest amount of emissions reduction that we possibly can. So, you know, I think AI will only make us smarter and only make us faster in that respect.
Bell
It's clear that the conversation around AI is far from one-dimensional. Here's Heather Rock from PG&E again sharing a utility’s view on both the promises but also the pressures of AI.
Rock
There is huge potential for AI. We can see ways that the application of AI can more quickly solve a lot of problems that we are facing, whether it's predictive maintenance on when we want to replace our equipment in the electric and gas system, to how we think about the spread of wildfire and adapt to climate change and the risks posed by it more quickly.
On the flip side, from the energy sector, as a person who works for a utility, we're thinking a lot about how can we meet the growing data center and energy needs of AI in a way that it meets our emission goals, as well as ensures that we are providing affordable energy for everyone.
Bell
While artificial intelligence sparked plenty of excitement during Climate Week, it also raised some important questions, especially about how we use it. As Chris pointed out earlier, AI can help us move faster and smarter, but speed alone isn't enough. Ryan Bogner, EY Digital Leader for Climate Change and Sustainability Services in the US, offers this sobering reminder.
Ryan Bogner
I think the biggest risks around AI is fundamentally it drives acceleration. And so, currently, we have a relatively unsustainable economy that AI is just going to pour gasoline on and drive the same kind of unsustainable economy forward. And so, unless we use AI and other technologies to fundamentally decarbonize our current economy, we're going to be scaling an unsustainable economy faster. And that's going to drive us further from our planetary boundaries that we have.
Bell
Besides call for collaboration and debates around AI, nature took center stage at this year's Climate Week in a way we haven't seen before. You've already heard from Marco Lambertini speak about the power of cross-sector collaboration, but his message goes even deeper. As companies begin to recognize nature not just as a philanthropic or ethical concern, but as a material factor in their resilience and profitability, it's becoming clear: Nature is a core part of the climate solution. Here's Marco again on why integrating nature into business strategy is essential.
Marco
Climate and nature have been now combined much more than before, and nature is seen as a big part of the solution to the climate crisis as well. The first thing that needs to happen in move beyond looking at nature as a PR, philanthropic, even an ethical imperative and embrace what increasingly companies are feeling — the material importance, the dependence of companies, profitability, resilience on healthy nature and healthy climate.
So, that one needs to happen, and we're seeing this happening in many companies, but of course, it has to happen on a much greater scale. So, stop taking nature for granted, understand the dependencies, look at your impacts and address the impacts in the name of your resilience and as part of the legal fiduciary responsibilities of the boards of these companies, not any longer as an ESG commitment or a duty.
What get measured get managed. What get measured get, in this case, conserved and restored. And particularly, what gets measured allows companies to demonstrate their actual delivery on the nature-positive agenda. And again, not just for the good of society, which is a super important task, but also for the good of the company itself.
Bell
This year's Climate Week made one thing clear. The private sector isn't just talking about change; it's working to build it. From regenerative agriculture to AI-powered climate solutions, the shift from strategy to delivery is hopefully now underway. And with COP30 coming up very soon in Belem, Brazil, the opportunity to scale these efforts globally is within reach. Marina Grossi, Special Envoy for Private Business at COP30, shares what it will take to accelerate this progress.
Marina Grossi
Well, that's the COP of implementation. And what I'm seeing in Climate Week in New York is a testimony of this is that business is really, really engaged. So, Belem will be the place that we can put everyone together or decision-makers, private sector, society, academia. So, let's unlock, you know, the gaps that we still have, the problems that we still have. But what I'm seeing right now is that a commitment and a lot of solutions, but we have to scale up. So, that's the point. How to accelerate this process?
Bell
So, there you have it, a summation of a number of points of view coming out of the Climate Week in New York City. It would be remiss not to reflect on the fact that we are in uncertain times from a political and a geopolitical context. And yet despite that, as you heard over 1,000 events in New York, we really are seeing a number of actors from the private, public and not-for-profit sector coming together. And hopefully, with the policy leaders coming together in Belem, we can see this come together in a unified action agenda. So, thanks everybody for listening.
This has been EY Sustainability Matters podcast. Of course, you can find all past episodes of the show on ey.com or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, we'd love for you to subscribe. And of course, ratings, reviews and all comments are very welcome. Please also visit ey.com, where you'll find a range of related and interesting articles that'll help you put bigger topics in the context of your business priorities. I look forward to welcoming you on the next episode of Sustainability Matters. Thanks for listening.
