With Climate Week NYC 2025 wrapping up, stakeholders across industries are reflecting on both the progress made and the challenges ahead. The theme “Power On” was quite prevalent as insights were shared to educate, call-to-action and provoke conversations about climate justice around the world. The week carried real momentum, with commitments and debates alike shaping what comes next in the global movement. Below you’ll find the highlights and reflections from NY Climate Week that signal where climate action, finance, and innovation may be headed next.
Overhead at New York Climate Week 2025 – Heatmap
As expected, this climate week featured lots of chatter about artificial intelligence — both the pros and the cons.
“The three-letter acronym I heard the most during New York Climate Week wasn’t EPA, COP, NDC, or GHG. It was PJM. The country’s largest electricity market — the PJM Interconnection, which reaches into 13 states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Michigan — has become the poster child for data center growth, clogged interconnection queues, and political backlash to rising electricity prices.”
“At this point, I think we’re used to the idea that the artificial intelligence boom is creating more demand for electricity — and that this higher demand is helping renewable developers during what would otherwise be a tough moment. One theme that stuck out to me at New York Climate Week, though, is how much the surge in Big Tech investment is harmonizing what used to be otherwise regional markets.”
Climate Week NYC 2025: Momentum from Commitment to Action – Climate Action
Climate Week NYC 2025 carried a different weight this year. The conversations were less about why climate finance and sustainable investing matter and more about how to make it work at scale. Across panels and private exchanges, a consistent message emerged: investors, lenders, and policymakers are past theory. The challenge now is execution.
Despite record levels of climate commitments, investment in clean energy, resilient infrastructure, and adaptation is not yet moving at the pace needed. However, institutions are increasingly embracing blended finance and innovative partnerships, especially in emerging markets where opportunities are enormous but capital remains scarce. While systemic barriers—such as policy uncertainty and fragmented standards—still pose challenges, there is growing momentum and creativity driving solutions that can accelerate deployment.
The concept of “double materiality” has moved from jargon into practice, forcing investors to look both ways: how climate change affects portfolios, and how portfolios affect the world. Resilience was another dominant theme. As climate shocks intensify, the financial system is being forced to reprice assets and rethink risk models.
Climate Week NYC 2025 Recap Highlights, Part 1: Thinking Globally – CleanTechnica
The clean technology and trade disruption have developed to the point where it is poised to increase economic benefit and jobs overall. However, the economics and jobs available will change due to creative destruction.
Some developing countries emphasized that they were paying the price for the cumulative emissions that made the developed world rich. Developing countries often focused on their efforts to reduce their already relatively small per capita emissions, often seeking financing to take them further on the path of sustainable development. Others were more focused on justice and surviving the impact of climate change on their countries, pleading for more global cooperation. Many larger countries highlighted their technology and major projects, while other smaller countries highlighted practical efforts, like teaching traditional boat building.
Better, Cheaper, Faster: Our Climate Week NYC 2025 summary – ERM
Investments in renewables, nuclear, storage, and grid modernization and expansion reached USD 2.2 trillion in 2025 , two-thirds of total energy investment and double new fossil fuel investment. Still, companies at CWNYC stressed the urgency of further ramping up clean energy investments to meet growing demand, especially for electricity.
Businesses are increasingly shifting their approach to sustainability, making quantifiable financial value of their sustainability actions the determining factor in investment choices.
Compliance with sustainability disclosure and performance rules is necessary but not sufficient; it is a foundation for action, not a tick-box exercise. Sustainability performance is a differentiator that usually results in preference rather than premiums. Customers want lower-carbon, nature-positive options to help meet their own sustainability obligations and commitments—at market rates. And investors like how they de-risk investments by lessening exposure to negative climate-related impacts. Sustainability performance is a differentiator that usually results in preference rather than premiums. Customers want lower-carbon, nature-positive options to help meet their own sustainability obligations and commitments—at market rates. And investors like how they de-risk investments by lessening exposure to negative climate-related impacts.
Climate Week NYC 2025: 3 notable themes – Trellis Group
At least three research analyses published to coincide with Climate Week NYC suggest that companies committed to reducing emissions and conserving nature and biodiversity are actually doubling down on that agenda:
- The number of U.S. companies with net-zero commitments rose 9 percent in the past 12 months, according to the Net Zero Tracker’s 2025 stocktake, which did note that most of those pledges aren’t very robust.
- A focused study that included 75 top companies by market capitalization found that while roughly 13 percent retreated from programs between April 2024 and May 2025, nearly one-third increased their investments.
- Close to 90 percent of CEOs think the case for sustainability is stronger now than five years ago, according to research by Accenture and the United Nations Global Compact, which represents more than 20,000 member companies. Almost all of 2,000 surveyed executives expect to include these metrics in their core strategies and compensation structures by 2050.
The biggest tech companies are spending billions of dollars on the AI data center buildout. To tame the associated emissions they’re investing in creative contracts to keep nuclear power on the grid, support new nuclear technologies and add emerging generation options, such as geothermal.
Heard at Climate Week: Anything but data centers – Axios
Venture investors at Climate Week NYC this week looked for anything to talk about other than data centers.
Why it matters: Funders are waiting for a shakeout in the overheated sector.
Inside the room: Data centers dominated virtually every panel and happy hour, as countless founders and funders hoped to capitalize on the sector’s insatiable energy and water demand.
Other observations from Climate Week:
- Visa jitters: “It’s going to have a massively negative impact on attracting the best talent to the U.S.,” Collaborative Fund managing partner Craig Shapiro says, “which could lead to more ambitious climate projects in other geographies.”
- Early-stage freeze: Nascent carbon-removal startups are going to have a hard time finding any funders, an investor says, as U.S. policy retrenchment and sluggish carbon-credit markets undercut the sector’s economics.
Reflections from NY Climate Week 2025 – Center on Global Energy Policy (Columbia)
Energy affordability was also much more top of mind this year–with power prices rising in the US, artificial intelligence (AI) spurring rapid power demand growth, insufficient progress made in Europe to address the competitiveness impacts of high energy prices, and lower-income countries continuing to face cost challenges to expand energy access and clean cooking solutions. The constant refrain that solar and wind are the cheapest forms of energy has much truth to it, but is insufficient to address the myriad barriers – political economy, regulation, total system-level needs, geopolitics, etc. – to deploying clean energy faster.
The intersection of these national security, energy security, affordability, economic development, and geopolitical issues with the energy transition has been the focus of CGEP’s work since its inception, and feels ever more critical to addressing climate change today. As my friend Meghan O’Sullivan and I wrote in the New York Times nearly four years ago, “if climate ambition comes into tension with energy reliability or affordability or the security of energy supplies, climate ambition will lose.” Unfortunately, that captures well what we saw at Climate Week this year.
Climate Industry Looks for Answers at New York Summit After Bruising Year – WSJ
It’s been a bruising year for the climate and sustainability industry.
Rollbacks in regulation, slashes to public funding and lawsuits targeting some of the biggest nonprofits have hobbled an industry that had long been riding a wave, spurred by governments worldwide signaling a commitment to lowering emissions.
Climate Week NYC—organized by the Climate Group and running alongside the United Nations General Assembly, held in the same city—draws leading policymakers, businesses and climate experts from around the globe, many of them with plans to set the sustainability agenda for the year ahead.
6 Takeaways From New York Climate Week’s Tale Of Two Cities – Forbes
Climate Week this year was part reality check, part strategy session, and part call to rally with whatever tools and tactics you have available and engage all your stakeholders, constituents and audiences.
Even though the United States federal government is either ignoring the impacts of a dangerously and historically warming planet, or in denial – such as the current U.S. president calling climate change “a con job” in his speech to the UN General Assembly – and defunding science, climate data collection and valuable research and development that would help all countries, communities and economies, most people understand the reality.
Sweden’s Stegra to supply green steel for Microsoft’s data centers – Canary Media
Microsoft says it will get green steel from a first-of-a-kind facility in northern Sweden as the tech giant looks to curb the climate impact of its data center build-out.
This week, Microsoft announced a two-part deal with Stegra (formerly H2 Green Steel), which is building a multibillion-dollar plant set to be completed in late 2026. Instead of relying on traditional coal-based methods, the Swedish project will produce steel using green hydrogen — made from renewable energy sources — and clean electricity.
“But it’s very strategic for us,” Reunanen told Canary Media during a visit to New York for Climate Week NYC. “It gives Stegra access to a customer that is in data centers, which is a market that we’ll be developing.”
Is your organization looking to “Power On” after this Climate Week NYC 2025?
FischTank PR is a media relations and communications firm specializing in working with brands across energy tech, sustainability, climate, mobility and the built environment. If you’re interested in achieving meaningful coverage for company, reach out to us at [email protected].
***News roundup guest post from FischTank PR interns Abby Collins and Nana Duah***
