Looking forward after Climate Week

Climate Week NYC happens every year alongside the United Nations General Assembly Meeting in New York. It is one of the few moments when the entire range of the climate movement—from panel discussions featuring CEOs and world leaders to performance artists and comedians—are able to rub shoulders. So many come to Climate Week NYC to get a jump on the conversations that will happen at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan.

And there were lots of conversations. Some were held via panels on stages, others were held in roundtable meetings and one-on-one over coffee, and several key points of emphasis emerged. Voluntary carbon markets, and the role of carbon credits in helping companies decarbonize their operations and their supply chain have been of particular interest, as companies seek the most cost-effective way to meet climate targets, and as governments look for real climate benefits and emissions reductions. Topics like saving tropical forests and empowering local communities, and especially women leaders, were also part of the conversation in New York.

Many are referring to the upcoming COP as a "finance COP," which means much of the focus will be on leveraging both private and public funding to finance both the rapid scaling of renewable energy so that we may transition away from fossil fuels, and the necessary work to make our communities, our economy and nature itself resilient against climate impacts that are increasing in frequency and worsening in severity.

It's "crunch time" for climate action—we only have five scant years to halve our emissions if we are to have any hope of limiting global warming to under 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. We're already seeing the impacts of a warming planet in the devastation caused by Helene all along the southeastern US, even in places like Asheville, North Carolina, that have in the past been hailed as "climate havens." Over the next year, we will see parties to the Paris Agreement, including the United States, offering up new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that will tell us how countries are gearing up to deliver on the promises they made in Paris. The stakes are high, the need for action is great, and time is running out.

It might seem a little odd then, faced with that kind of urgency, that Climate Week began for me with a keynote address at an event hosted by Mother Jones at the New School campus called "Better Worlds Ahead: Realizing Our Brighter Climate Futures," which featured a visioning exercise and a conversation between Stacey Abrams and Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. The event was a moment to challenge the traditional "doom and gloom" narrative around climate change by asking us to envision what the world looks like if we actually succeed in tackling climate change. Far from being an exercise in wishful thinking, taking that moment to conceive and hold a vision of the future seems to me an important and necessary first step to making that vision a reality.

Over the next two days, WWF offered its vision of climate action through its WWF@theNest program at the NEST Climate Campus at the Javits Center. Our two days of experts and ideas on climate were not only livestreamed but recorded. Some of the highlights included:

• Jason Clay of WWF's Markets Institute Codex Planetarius, a bold idea to address the environmental impact of food production, including its significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, by advocating for minimum environmental performance standards designed to reduce the key impacts of globally traded food.
  
• Marty Spitzer led a vibrant discussion on the role of making and keeping science-based targets in addressing emissions from the corporate sector.
• Josefina Braña Varela hosted a standing-room-only crowd in a discussion of the value of public-private investment in tropical forest landscapes that featured the president of the Walmart Foundation.
• WWF Chief Operations Officer Loren Mayor led a panel of dynamic women who are leaders in the climate movement through their involvement with the CARE-WWF Alliance.

Three of America Is All In's co-chairs graced the main stage of the NEST Climate Campus—Gina McCarthy with Mindy Lubber, my own conversation with Governor Jay Inslee, and former EPA Administrator and Apple Chief Sustainability Officer Lisa Jackson with our own Carter Roberts. Most of the recordings of these events will be available on the WWF website for you to enjoy in the coming weeks.

Now the focus of the climate world shifts to COP29 in Baku. WWF will again be at the COP, monitoring the negotiations closely and showcasing to the thousands in attendance the work we are doing to deliver our vision of what the world can look like when we successfully meet the climate challenge.

If you want to stand with us at COP29, I encourage you to add your name to our climate action petition. We'll be presenting all the names to US officials prior to the COP to demonstrate how many are committed to seeing the US government fulfill the promises it made as a signatory to the Paris Agreement.

Together, we can make that vision of a better climate future a reality.

Marcene Mitchell is WWF's Senior Vice President, Climate Change.