Top 5 Ideas from Climate Week

The Climate Week NYC 2022, held last month, 19 – 25, September, 2022. The event which was hosted by the Climate Group, in conjunction with the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and the City of New York, brought together leaders in climate action from business, government, and the climate community.

The 2022 theme of Climate Week was ‘getting it done’, with events focusing on how collectively businesses, governments and the climate sector can call for the meaningful contributions still needed to halve carbon emissions by 2030 and to be on a path to net-zero by 2050.

This article by Brickstone reviews the GI Hub’s report on key infrastructure takeaways from the Climate Week 2022.

Ideas from The Climate Week 2022

Climate change represents a major challenge in the world today, threatening the lives and livelihoods of over 100 million in extreme poverty. Aside from the planetary-scale changes on earth, climate change poses adverse economic, infrastructure, and health risks to the people, all of which are projected to be heightened if urgent and collective actions are not implemented. 

As a way forward, events like the Climate Week NYC 2022 are held in a bid to bring together voices across the spectrum to discuss and implement effective climate solution-driven actions. These actions include both mitigation and adaptation measures, cutting across infrastructure, financing, energy transitions, electronic transport systems and so on.

At the recently held Climate Week NYC, business leaders, government officials, and other participants from the week rallied around the tangible sense of urgency, worked to absorb what the current impacts are, and discussed the difficulties around taking necessary action. 

In lieu of the above, the following are GI Hub’s shared key infrastructure takeaway from the event:

Technology is increasingly being deployed to solve climate challenges. The importance of technology in helping us ‘getting it done’ could not be overemphasized as it was featured in countless conversations, from panel sessions to keynote addresses. Accordingly, the technology sector is thinking outside the box in response to new threats from climate change and how ClimateTech can better set us up for success and resilience. It’s increasingly clear that ClimateTech will play a huge role in enabling the resilient and sustainable infrastructure of the future. GI Hub has a collection of use cases demonstrating the application of ClimateTech for infrastructure, with analysis of the sectors and technologies represented.

Partnerships to meet net zero. The urgent need for bold, creative, and collaborative partnerships was a common theme and came across most strongly during conversations on Africa. Not only the need for partnerships between the public and private sectors, but among neighbouring countries. Panellists at the Climate Week shared how African countries are increasingly looking to each other to address the challenges posed by climate change and the lack of infrastructure development. Cross-border infrastructure investment has grown across the continent, led by investments in ports and railways and leading to growth and development.

You can’t change what you don’t measure – more data is needed. Data to support environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment has made huge strides in recent years. Climate Week panellists and participants highlighted several examples of how environmental risk had been ‘baked into’ infrastructure investment underpinned by new data – the SDI Owner Asset Platform is one such example. However, during event discussions there was broad consensus that work is needed for data to support social and governance investment.

Change is the new normal. The urgent need to expedite the development of inclusive, resilient, and sustainable infrastructure to facilitate and adapt to change was a common theme throughout discussions at Climate Week. These changes are expected to accelerate over the coming years, as mentioned during our meeting with Ibrahim Odeh, Founding Director, Global Leaders in Construction Management, Columbia University and member of our Academic Advisory Panel: “For the last more than two decades, we have been witnessing rapid and constant changes. All these changes are not fading away anytime soon. We need to focus on developing and designing adaptive cities that can respond to the new normal of change and disruptions.”

New York is shaking off its pandemic cobwebs and is roaring back to life. We experienced the signs of a city struggling to keep up with the sheer number of people in its environs. On every street corner, in every meeting and conference, we felt the electricity of a city buzzing with people, fresh ideas, and a renewed vigour. Despite, or perhaps because of, the many challenges it faces, New York is getting it done when it comes to infrastructure. This matters globally as cities buckling under environmental, social, and economic challenges can again make New York as an exemplar of how to address some of the city’s most pressing problems.

Read more on the Climate Week NYC here.