I'm pre-writing this newsletter before the whirlwind of Climate Week in New York City. It's difficult to explain the sheer chaos of Climate Week if you haven't been there. I'm going to try to explain.

When you think of a conference, you think of a single event held at a convention center or hotel. The longest walk you have is from Ballroom A to Ballroom E. This isn't that.

Climate Week is a completely decentralized collection of events held at various venues all around the city, running from roughly 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM daily. In between, you have to get from Central Park to lower Manhattan to Brooklyn to Midtown, all by subway or walking. (Due to traffic and dignitary convoys for the meeting at the United Nations, traveling by taxi is pointless.)

Attending any of these events requires preregistration, both for security reasons and capacity limitations. If you're lucky, you'll get admitted to roughly 1 of every 4 events that you register for. None of these events give a location prior to acceptance.

As I'm writing this, I'm looking at my Wednesday schedule, where I've been accepted for 2-4 events per time slot over a 14-hour span. I've marked them off on a map to identify the most useful sessions for each time slot, balanced against the relative locations of the events before or after. It's wild.

So why do I go?

The New York version of Climate Week is the most insightful week of the year. This is where you can hear what the finance people are thinking. What are they prioritizing? What are they funding? I'll know exactly where the business world will be heading for the coming year.

Three years ago I got insights into the infrastructure act, and how the limitations weren't based in funding, but in trained professionals to implement the changes. Two years ago I found out that the financial people were going to prioritize re-opening closed power plants to power AI a year before it actually happened. Last year I learned some amazing things about insurance and business resilience.

This entire week is about skating to where the puck is going. And that will be worth the exhaustion.

One of the best ways to keep an eye on an ecosystem is through citizen science. Things like the Merlin Bird App serve a dual purpose: researchers gain data on the habitats and prevalence of birds within a variety of ecosystems, but also it helps "ordinary people" build connections to their natural environment. People who are involved in their natural environment are more likely to protect it. At a Climate Week bird walk in Central Park in 2024, one of the naturalists explained how important it is to get New Yorkers to engage with pigeons, the most prevalent animal in their ecosystem.

​Sustainable web development is taking steps forward with the collaboration between the Green Software Foundation and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). "By combining GSF's expertise in software carbon measurement with W3C's global reach in web standards, we provide access to practical tools and specifications for measuring and reducing the environmental impact of the web to practitioners worldwide. The collaboration aims to make sustainability considerations an integral part of web development, just like accessibility and performance are today." (Disclaimer: I am involved with the W3C.)

In an article for The Guardian, Kate Marvel talks about how we've come together before to avert ecological disasters. Can we do it again?

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Consulting

​Reduce your Scope 3 emissions​

Alisa Bonsignore

Founder, Strategist, and Author