Blog — S&P Global Sustainable1 — 02 October, 2026
Climate Week NYC takeaways from S&P Global Energy
Resilience, security, adaptation, electrification and AI took center stage in 2026.
Climate Week NYC convened leaders from the public and private sector for more than 1,000 events across New York City Sept. 20-27. Below, we outline S&P Global Energy’s five key takeaways from conversations on the ground.
1. Stakeholders across the spectrum are seeking common ground on language.
At Climate Week NYC 2026, we heard increased focus on the words that climate and sustainability professionals use and how the language can evolve to reach a broader, bipartisan audience — a topic front of mind as the US nears midterm elections. Attendees from across sectors said they are looking for inclusive language with wide appeal, and one attendee joked that Climate Week should be rebranded ”Affordable Energy Week.”
Security is one term that appears to have a broad social passport. Both energy security and national security through the lens of climate change were common themes at Climate Week NYC.
Across events, investors and companies also used the words resilience and durability to describe how they are navigating near-term disruptions to build lasting strategies. “Resilience” was used broadly to discuss physical climate risks, security of energy systems and affordability in light of rising energy prices. This trend is also apparent in our analysis of US-listed companies’ earnings call transcripts, where the word resilience is on the rise.
Further listening: As Climate Week NYC kicks off, energy, climate and national security converge
Further reading: Resilience as a framework for sustainability
2. El Niño is putting concerns about food security front and center.
Food security was another focus throughout the week, thanks to the powerful El Niño event meteorologists are forecasting. Scientists at the S&P Global Climate Center of Excellence expect El Niño impacts will include warmer winters across northern North America; severe drought in Central and South America; and hotter, drier weather that increases wildfire risks across Southeast Asia and Australia.
This all has knock-on effects for food systems that are already under stress from climate change as well as supply chain disruptions resulting from the Middle East conflict.
“And [that] brings the question of: How do we need to invest for more adaptation and resilience in food?” said JPMorganChase Global Head of Climate Advisory Dr. Sarah Kapnick, who spoke with S&P Global’s All Things Sustainable podcast on the sidelines of Climate Week.
Listen to the full interview: Why JPMorgan is looking at climate, energy and food system risks through a resilience lens
Further reading: El Niño: The climate science view of key regional impacts and risks
3. Conversations about adaptation became more practical for the financial community.
After becoming the buzzword at Climate Week NYC in 2025, adaptation made its way onto many Climate Week agendas in 2026. This makes sense in the landscape of the past year: Record-breaking droughts, heat waves and wildfires have dominated headlines around the globe. There is growing understanding that these events will become more frequent and severe over time with climate change as the world overshoots the Paris Agreement 1.5-degree C limit on global warming.
Against this backdrop, companies are investing in adaptation and resilience efforts to prepare for the impacts of climate change — 46% of companies in an S&P Global analysis now report adaptation plans, up from 19% in 2022. This rising focus was apparent at Climate Week NYC as adaptation permeated conversations hosted by investors, financial institutions and insurers trying to understand what adaptation measures are available and how to finance and implement them. Although there are increasing investments by companies to secure their infrastructure against climate physical risks, business models for investing in adaptation for the broader public good are still under development.
4. AI was a conversation about risks as well as opportunities.
AI was ubiquitous in Climate Week NYC conversations in 2026, and speakers throughout the week acknowledged the technology’s risks alongside its transformative potential.
The shift to a somewhat more balanced tone on AI comes as initial enthusiasm among investors and business leaders is meeting resistance in 2026 — including in the form of communities challenging the local costs and benefits of data center expansion. The chart below from S&P Global’s 451 Research shows how sharply data center delays and cancellations in the US have climbed in recent years because of local opposition.
This topic was woven into conversations throughout Climate Week, and hyperscalers and other parts of the AI ecosystem grappled with how to respond to community pushback and effectively communicate AI’s upside.
"People have legitimate questions about the impacts of data centers,” NVIDIA Head of Sustainability Josh Parker said in an interview with the All Things Sustainable podcast at the conference. “It's really important for us and for our partners who are actually building the data centers, I think, to be proactive and transparent.”
Listen to the episode: Tech giant NVIDIA talks AI’s sustainability risks and opportunities
Read the research: The sustainability risks threatening AI’s resilience narrative
5. Looking ahead to COP31: AI, electrification and infrastructure
This year’s New York Climate Week discourse increasingly focused on the electricity grid as both enabler and gating factor for the energy transition. Markets and governments are underestimating the size and complexity of the global power infrastructure investment that is needed, and what shape it will take as Asia-Pacific markets pivot to adapt to oil and gas price volatility caused by ongoing disruption to traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. US and EU policymakers are also underestimating how expensive it will be to diversify their cleantech supply chains against overreliance on lower-cost Chinese exports.
These themes featured prominently throughout Climate Week and in discussions during the 81st Session of the UN General Assembly, offering an early indication of the priorities and challenges likely to shape the agenda ahead of COP31. Within these discussions, attention increasingly focused on the practical challenges of translating climate objectives into delivery under increasingly complex economic, geopolitical and fiscal conditions.
Electrification was consistently identified as a central enabler of decarbonization, reinforcing concerns about whether hardware supply chains, network expansion, storage deployment and system flexibility can keep pace with rising demand. The growing attention given to AI further underscored the growing importance of power system planning as electricity demand rises. There was optimism and some evidence that AI tools could help address AI’s power demand.
More broadly, discussions highlighted how climate objectives are becoming increasingly intertwined with industrial policy, energy security and economic competitiveness. For COP31, this points to a growing focus on governance and coordination challenges, particularly where climate, energy and industrial policy objectives intersect.
