Senior Associate of Product, Sustainability & Strategy Lily Louis reflects on what we learned from Climate Week about our relationship with nature and our community.  

That’s a wrap! After hosting 15 events during Climate Week, we're exhausted but deeply fulfilled. While we were thrilled to welcome over 1,500 people into our space throughout the week, it wasn’t just about the impressive foot traffic. More importantly, we had the opportunity to share more about our values and our work and learn from others in the impact community. Hosting is important to us because community is central to everything we do. Bringing this community together under one roof is a great exercise in empathizing with nature: we are all cohabitants of this planet and ought to be better houseguests. Hosting at such a large scale can be challenging, but also incredibly rewarding — when your houseguests behave appropriately. 

Here are some of our key takeaways, or, as some might say, the golden rules for being a good houseguest:

Leave it better than you found it. Perhaps the most important rule of being a houseguest: clean up after yourself and leave the space better than you found it. Acting as good custodians of our land requires accountability. Conversations at “Nature: Making the Priceless Valuable” and “Transitioning to Transparency with Restor”  this week highlighted the ways we haven’t done this for our own home, and the mechanisms we can use to better support accountability as responsible custodians. This doesn’t just mean taking out the trash … 

Follow the house rules: Don’t impose your own rules in someone else’s home! While vast pools of capital have been committed to nature and regenerative projects, these traditional financing approaches often perpetuate the very extractive models they seek to subvert. Samantha Power and the rest of the BioFi Revolution crew discussed the adoption of regenerative bioregional principles to center local communities, their knowledge, needs and house rules! 

Tell good stories at the dinner table. Storytelling is at the heart of any good gathering, and an essential skill for any guest. Stories are the most powerful tools at our disposal; they have the potential to live far longer than we do and often outlive the institutions we toil to set up and maintain. Climate Week is about not only convening community but also building and strengthening the collective narrative around the importance of nature. Personal stories, such as Steven Donziger’s in “Crude Reflections,” make the challenges we face — like enforcing corporate accountability — tangible, and they inspire action.

Respect fresh perspectives: Every guest brings something unique to the table. Throughout the week, it was inspiring to see organizations and individuals — beyond the usual asset allocators — use their networks, influence, and skills to support nature. We welcomed adjacent industries, including the teams at Warner, Universal, and Sony, to our Climate Week conversation on efforts to decarbonize the music industry, and SailGP’s athletes to explore the efforts of their sailing partnership with Creatures United—an initiative dedicated to building awareness of the biodiversity crisis! 

Comment (positively) on the art & get the music going! Studio Silverback’s Open Planet initiative dedicated to democratizing premium nature footage and Enzo Barracco’s work, part of his Sir Ernest Shackleton-inspired series titled “The Noise of Ice”, displayed in our gallery, helped shift perspectives away from the bustle of Manhattan and back toward nature. Collaborations like Spotify and the Museum for the United Nations’s Sounds Right initiative seek to reward nature as an artist, and collect funds for nature conservation. The initiative’s use of ocean waves, rainstorms, wind, bird songs, and talented vocalists formed our acoustic backdrop for the week.

Stay curious. Ask questions—even those that lead down unexpected paths. Our conversation with Paul Moinester of Topo Finance and Ken LaRoe of Climate First Bank on the carbon footprint of cash is a great example of how curiosity about the opacity of cash management can spark new insights. This curiosity is most effective when supported by data, as highlighted in our discussion with S2G, Sarah Kapnick, PhD, chief scientist at NOAA, and Megan Hart, Global Head of Analytics & Collaborations at Aon. In a world where consensus is rare and often a major obstacle to proactive climate action, data-driven insights are essential. By using hard data to quantify both risks and opportunities, even resistant sectors can be incentivized to take meaningful climate action. Data serves not only as a tool for analysis but as a powerful driver of progress, especially in areas where subjective debates or differing opinions could otherwise stall forward momentum.

Thank your host. Don’t forget to thank your host. As Ralph Chami noted in The Fed’s “Race Against Climate Inaction”, the services provided by nature—like those of whales in sequestering carbon—aren’t free. Acknowledging and thanking nature’s species for their contributions is a crucial first step. Our role in this movement, as Alessa Berg of TTI aptly put it, is to act as translators, bridging the gap between nature’s inherent worth and the language of our economic systems. In translating the intrinsic value of nature into terms our economic systems can understand, without reducing it to a mere commodity, we can foster deeper respect for and action towards preserving the natural world.

With all this in mind, a massive thank you to my dear friend Omar for being the most compassionate, patient, and brilliant partner throughout this Climate Week journey. Working with Omar is much like my first love, poetry—our collaboration flowed, sang, and occasionally rhymed.