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Fall. Forward?
September 26, 2024
Urgency Meets Climate Optimism in NYC
Ah, New York in the Autumn. It vibrates as it always does, but with a sense of urgency this week. The United Nations General Assembly’s Climate Week is run in cooperation with the City of New York. Another long, hot summer has wrapped, marking yet another season — and year — of record temperatures and extreme weather.
As the Biden Administration enters its last quarter, there is encouraging news about creating more than 150 thousand US clean energy jobs. However, the conversations about climate and climate policy are as complex as any around society’s grand challenges. As a communicator at the intersection of policy, business and advocacy, the nuances and naysayers around the narratives about climate are staggering. We have leap-frogged from building resilience around climate change to extreme gravity around a climate in crisis. But yet, we struggle to agree.
Hot planet, overheated rhetoric.
And at the same time, climate has been weaponized politically. How can we communicate climate and climate policy in a complex and divided world? Narratives become twisted. Words become signals — both welcome and unwelcome. Policies create friction. Tensions are high. Complicating the conversation, climate — long the target of strategic old-school disinformation campaigns — is now squarely in the sites of new and insidious online disinformation campaigns.
But after a week of convenings, networking breakfasts, roundtables, and speeches — including the Climate and Sustainability Leadership Summit FINN Partners hosted with 1 Business World — I am struck by the possibility. The possibility that we will ideate, innovate, invent, and invest our way out of the dystopian future of extreme heat and cataclysmic weather has been foreshadowed in far too many science fiction movies.
The Summit was a microcosm of the urgent ecosystem of climate week in NYC — with journalists, academics, CEOs, advocates, and communicators. It was an opportunity to hear from colleagues and our clients the details about the work universities are doing to lead the way in climate research, how start-up and established companies are driving the green economy, learning from leading thinkers who are helping shape policies that are fueling that transition, and absorbing the energy of the tireless advocates for all manner of improvement for people and the planet — from fighting plastic pollution, working for environmental justice, to battling the threat of mass extinction. It all inspires hope.
The phrase “Climate Optimism” has been sprinkled liberally throughout the week. There is a sense that the solutions are out there — but we need the collective will to deploy them systemically through policy frameworks. Climate-centric policy happens at many levels — cities innovate, localities rule, states evolve, and countries can lead or lag. Admittedly, much of climate policy is technical, contributing to confusion and controversy over the way forward. Permitting. Infrastructure. Investments. Tax credits. Complexity fuels the hobgoblins of doubt and disbelief. However, global moments like Climate Week are extraordinary opportunities to bring parties together for conversations, connections, and collective action that can drive meaningful change.
Because perhaps, just perhaps, we all want the same things. We want to live in a world where economies can prosper people can work, live…and breathe healthfully. But the difficulty is the path. Government and policy frameworks require decisions and choices about how we retain elements of the present but also make choices about the future. There is no question that the complexity of addressing the climate crisis is daunting. Making big bets and future-casting allow us to invest in possible national and global outcomes and how we might shape and adapt to them.
The words that are said this week are important; the connections made will drive collaboration and communications, but deeds are essential, and policy is the forcing function that turns those things into meaningful action. When we return to New York next Autumn of 2025, it will be the year that the Paris Accord will mark its tenth anniversary since its signing. Let us work together to ensure that we have something to celebrate. Our shared future depends on it.
POSTED BY: Jessica Berk Ross
