Bigger Bolder Faster: the Leader’s guide to ‘what happens after’ NY Climate Week 2024

What I want you to know regardless of whether you:

• Were at NY Climate Week last week
• Were not at NY Climate but are working on/in/around climate
• Didn’t track NY Climate Week at all or don’t consider yourself ‘a climate person

We need to go much faster on tackling climate change:

• Climate Change is not the future. It’s already happening.
• We have five years to halve the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Without this, by 2030 the earth’s temperature will be 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than in pre-industrial times.
• This means, that we are already seeing, among other things, significantly more extreme heat, extreme weather, diseases, water stress, and the resultant negative impacts on people and the economy.

We must immediately begin assessing the impacts of our decisions on future generations instead of just the short-term cost-benefits of whatever we do.

• According to UNICEF, a billion of the world’s 2.4 billion children worldwide are at extremely high risk of the impacts of climate change.
• Climate change is one of Gen Z’s top concerns. Throughout Climate Week and beyond, I’ve observed young climate activists organizing and making themselves heard.  These are your children, as well as your workforce, voters and consumers of today and tomorrow. They are asking us all to step up and fight climate change.
• The UN just passed its Pact for the Future, including the Declaration on Future Generations. In short: our actions (or inactions) today will have an exponential impact on our children.

There are many climate leaders,, but we need all leaders to join hands with us:

• There were over 100,000 people at NY Climate Week, ranging from technical experts, to Corporate Sustainability leaders, non-profits, industry associations, coalitions, activists, UN and political representatives, innovators, venture capitalists, world leaders, young people.
• To combat climate change successfully, we need all of us. We need all of you who are at the fringes, all of you who don’t yet think climate is ‘your job.’ There is no part of the economy, thought or policy that is untouched by climate change.
• Consider all of the resistance you may be giving your Sustainability team because there are competing pressures, and then flip the thought on its head. What if you used the energy you are spending on resistance, on helping find solutions instead?

We all need to be much Bigger Bolder Faster than we have ever been before: 

• As a leader: call your Sustainability team, experts, networks (and if you don’t know whom to call, call me and I’ll point you in the right direction). Ask: what will it take for us to go twice, thrice, ten times faster to combat climate change?
• As groups of leaders: get out of silos, resist the urge to make combating climate change a competitive sport, figure out how we can shift systems faster and then shift those systems fast. There has been a resistance to collective action, because collective action tends to slow things down. Collective action is led by people. You can choose to challenge slowdowns and help move the collective faster.
• As anyone who works in, around, adjacent to this space (and especially those who are making the multitudinous measuring and reporting frameworks): look at yourselves in the mirror everyday and ask ‘is what I’m doing going to help us all go farther faster? If not, how am I going to pivot quickly to make sure that when history is written, that it says ‘they solved it’ rather than ‘they had the perfect ways to measure and disclose how they weren’t solving it.’

#NYCW24 #ClimateWeekNYC #regenerativeresonance #regenerativeleadership