A download from Climate Week NYC 2026: what I heard about nature risk, business decisions and the investment needed to maintain production.
For over 20 years, Climate Week NYC has been held on the third week of September to coincide with the UN General Assembly. The sheer volume and variety of attendees makes it unrivalled as the largest climate conference of the year, with over 100,000 people spread across 1,000 events. The notional theme this year was the energy transition, though all the focus of my discussions was elsewhere: supply chain resilience, regenerative agriculture, and nature related risk and opportunity. A few themes from my conversations:
My clearest takeaway from discussions was the importance of getting CFOs to recognise the cost of inaction before asking them to invest in nature.
A business seeking money to restore soil or protect a water supply will usually be asked to demonstrate a return. How much more will it produce? What costs will it save? When will the investment pay back?
These are reasonable questions. But so often sustainability teams lose this argument because they are investing to maintain productivity levels of a farm, mine, or factory. If soils are degrading, water supplies are becoming less reliable and raw materials are harder to source, maintaining today’s production may itself require capital expenditure. An investment that prevents output from falling has value, even if it never increases output above today’s level.
The first task is therefore to get the CFO to recognise the cost of inaction. This requires high quality financial quantification of nature related risk. Only then can the company fairly assess expenditure to maintain production.
The scope of this assessment is critical. For too long companies have focused nature risk assessments on a company’s direct operations that can be found in commercial asset location databases. This approach makes sense but is limited as most nature risks sit upstream in the supply chain. A factory can be well protected while the farms supplying its ingredients further up the supply chain face declining yields.
A partial analysis of operations only often captures only a fraction of nature risk a company is exposed to - and can give the false impression that environmental risks just aren’t material.
I heard companies and financial institutions describe how they were beginning to include supply chains in their nature risk assessments. But it is not easy. Barclays described its automotive value-chain assessment as complicated, time-consuming and difficult to scale internally.
For this initial assessment, companies do not always need a highly precise estimate of impacts, dependencies, and risks at every site to recognise a problem worth addressing.
At Anthesis’ session on making risk useful for business decisions, a leading beauty company described financial implications as critical to getting sustainability risks into enterprise risk management. A confectionary company used estimates linked to the cost of goods sold to understand the scale of its exposure. Its emphasis was on establishing whether the risk was material before refining the number.
That suggests a practical sequence. First identify which exposures could be large enough to change a decision. Then concentrate the detailed analysis on those exposures.
There were encouraging signs that more and more companies were recognising environmental risks were material to their business - and created commercial opportunities. The TNFD’s latest status report identifies a doubling in organisations making TNFD-aligned disclosures over the past year.
But another theme came out from discussions: recognition of a risk does not mean an institution knows how to manage it. Banks and corporates alike are still often figuring out what decisions they will change as a result of their nature risk assessment and which stakeholders need to be involved to make those decisions.
Discussions made clear why some companies have a stronger incentive to invest in mitigating nature risk than others. The resilience argument was strongest where companies had limited room to move: a fixed facility, a concentrated source of supply, demanding quality standards or costly supplier changes.
A buyer that believes it can purchase an equivalent commodity elsewhere may see less reason to invest in the place it currently sources from. Long time horizons and infrequent disruptions make the case harder still.
We need to understand these differences if we want more investment in nature. A general statement about environmental risk will carry less weight than evidence about a critical input, an exposed site or a contract that is about to be renewed.
There is also a limit to what switching suppliers achieves. It may reduce one company’s exposure while leaving the damaged landscape behind. Businesses committed to their suppliers over the long term need to consider how contracts, technical support and shared investment can help sustain production where it already takes place.
Across the banking and corporate sessions, a consistent lesson was that an assessment needs someone able to act on its findings.
A leading engineering company described the years of engagement needed to bring procurement into this work. A confectionery company explained how having sustainability report into the Chief Value Chain Officer helped connect it to operational decisions. A British bank involved coverage bankers from the outset. A chemicals company brought climate and nature into a combined client conversation.
The practical lesson is to involve procurement, finance, risk and commercial teams when defining the assessment. Agree which decisions it will inform, what evidence is needed and who will use it. Those questions should shape the work before the analysis begins.
To finish on an optimistic note, one welcome piece of news I learned about during the week was the planned Natural History GCSE in England. Developed with OCR and expected to be taught from September 2028, it should help more young people understand the natural systems around them.
That understanding is needed in boardrooms today. The health of ecosystems affects whether businesses can secure raw materials, maintain production and meet their commitments to customers. Recognising these connections should change how companies forecast performance, assess risk and allocate capital.
I left New York encouraged by how many businesses are beginning to make those connections. The next step is to turn that understanding of exposure to nature risk into practical investments to mitigate the risks, with finance and procurement teams helping to lead the work. But many companies have not yet convinced their decisions makers that those investments make sense. For these companies, before asking whether a business can afford to invest in nature, we need to establish what it will cost to carry on without doing so.