What you need to know from Climate Week NYC

From electric freight corridors in Brazil to zero-waste cities in Japan, governments, companies, cities and investors used New York to highlight the solutions they plan to bring to COP31 in Antalya.

Climate Week NYC is one of the last major global climate gatherings before the UN Climate Change Conference (COP31) in November. This year set a record, with more than 100,000 participants and 1500 events stretching from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Among them were hundreds of Global Climate Action Agenda events convened by partners on electrified transport and buildings, green industry, zero waste, city resilience, finance, oceans and more.

With so much happening at once, it was easy to lose track of the larger picture. Here are five takeaways from the week.

1. The Action Agenda drew support on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly

At a COP31 Presidency flagship event inside the United Nations’ ECOSOC chamber on the opening day of Climate Week, the turnout showed how much momentum the Action Agenda is gaining. Delegates from countries, UN agencies, development banks and international agencies voiced their support for the Action Agenda, alongside heads of UN agencies, development banks and international organizations.

Murat Kurum, the COP31 President-Designate, shared updates on his presidency’s 10 priority themes for the Action Agenda, led by a goal of raising electricity's share of final energy consumption to 35 percent. The Action Agenda is organized around six thematic areas and coordinates work by governments, companies, cities, investors and civil society. Each COP Presidency may choose areas within that existing agenda where it intends to focus its attention and scale solutions faster.

Speaking from the floor, Jaime de Bourbon de Parme, director of the OECD Environment Directorate, said the Action Agenda’s implementation focus resonated widely. "There's a sense of: we can do this, and we will do this, and we have no other choice."

2. Electrification is the solution everyone is organizing around

If one phrase followed attendees from event to event, it was ‘35 by 35’ – raising electricity's share of the world's final energy consumption to 35 percent, up from 23 percent today. An International Energy Agency (IEA) report published during the week estimates that achieving the 35 percent target would cut average household energy bills by 15 percent and save oil-importing countries roughly USD 400 billion a year.

At an electrification roundtable, hosted by the Climate High-Level Champions, Okan Uğurlu, COP31 Presidency Energy Focal Point said ‘35x35’ was built to speak to every country, and adapt to different contexts. In one place, electrification might mean more heat pumps and electric trucks. In another, it could mean connecting households to power for the first time.

Dan Ioschpe, COP30 Climate High-Level Champion, welcomed the focus on end users. "For much of the last decade, our attention has been on the supply side – expanding renewables, improving energy efficiency and bringing down the cost of renewable energy," he said. "Now we need to move as decisively on the demand side.

Peter Bakker, president of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, said the pace of electrification needs to increase roughly fourfold, adding that business and industry is ready to support the effort. “I hope to be here back in this room with all of you 12 months from now, and hear about 100 initiatives where governments and industries have moved this forward.”

The roundtable was designed to help develop and advance those initiatives. Participants from government ministries and major electrification initiatives, including the Utilities for Net Zero Alliance (UNEZA), TRATON trucks, SSAB steel, Octopus electric vehicles, and others sat at tables organized by sector: buildings, grids and storage, industry, and transport. Alongside showcasing existing progress and solutions, each was asked what ambitious but feasible outcomes they can collectively work toward to speed up the pace of electrification. Early proposals included more investment in grids and storage, an expansion of zero-emission freight corridors, and fully electrified urban cores in major cities.

3. Electric freight corridors are moving from pilot to proof

One proof point that electrification can work in the hardest sectors is in zero emission freight corridors.

Five years ago, when Volkswagen Truck & Bus launched Brazil's first electric truck, it was tough to find buyers, said Priscila Rocha, the company's head of sustainability during a transportation roundtable. "The status quo said to us that it's not possible at this time," she said. The company pressed ahead anyway. "Will we wait until we have public policy, infrastructure, and financing? No, we won't."

If electrifying heavy trucks seemed like a tough sell, a zero-emission freight corridor appeared even more out of reach. Yet, today Volkswagen Truck & Bus, part of the TRATON Group, is a co-founder of e-Dutra, a coalition electrifying freight along an 800-kilometer roundtrip highway between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The corridor was launched at COP30 under the Action Agenda and is part of a Plan to Accelerate Solutions for Green Transport Corridors. Nearly 50 companies have joined, including truck makers, shippers, carriers and banks, working toward 1,000 battery-electric trucks on the road by 2030.

Stories of seemingly impossible climate solutions taking off set the tone at Climate Week NYC. The e-Dutra model is spreading with other zero emission corridors taking shape in Colombia and along the US West Coast. The incoming COP31 Presidency has also targeted zero emission freight corridors as a priority for expansion under ‘35x35.’

At transport roundtables convened throughout the week, Action Agenda partners also focused on tackling the practical barriers to electric freight, including charging infrastructure and incentives for zero-emission trucks. In Brazil, the government is weighing a temporary cut in import tariffs on fast chargers, said Adalberto Maluf of Brazil's Ministry of Environment. An infrastructure working group, led by Catalyst Mobility, expects to publish its charging plan for the e-Dutra corridor this month.

Heather Tomley, Port of Long Beach's managing director of planning and environmental affairs, noted that 650 zero-emission trucks now serve the United States’ busiest container port, with plans to scale to thousands of trucks. They are also planning to invest in inland charging infrastructure.

4. COP31 Champion launched a collaboration on zero waste

Samed Ağırbaş, the COP31 Climate High-Level Champion, used the week to launch the Istanbul Zero Waste Action Platform. Its premise is that the solutions already exist but too often work in isolation.

Of the Action Agenda's initial 119 Plans to Accelerate Solutions, 24 already deal with waste or the circular economy, said Christian Mensah, Senior Advisor to the COP31 Climate High-Level Champion. The platform, he said, will be measured "by what those organizations can achieve because they are connected."

Representatives from Yokohama, Japan, welcomed the initiative, saying they plan to bring a host of solutions to the table. Japan's second-largest city has cut its waste by about half since 2001 even as its population grew. The city held 15,000 workshops with residents and closed three of its seven incinerators. "We see citizens not simply as consumers," said Tomomi Yamashita, director general of Yokohama's International Affairs Bureau. "We see them as co-creators of circularity."

Brazil’s environmental ministry said it plans to start with organic waste, in an effort to cut down on methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Maluf said his country is working to build costed project portfolios, bring waste pickers into formal systems and close illegal dump sites. A new Zero Waste Districts initiative, also launched by the COP31 Climate High-Level Champion through the Zero Waste Foundation, extends that work to recycling, reuse, repair and food loss.

5. Cities and regions are tackling electrification and extreme heat

Kicking off Climate Week NYC, more than 25 mayors and senior officials from 34 cities across G20 countries gathered for Urban20, comparing how they are lowering energy costs and protecting residents from climate impacts.

The challenges, they said, look much the same from one continent to the next. “Whether we lead a city in Africa, Europe, Asia or the Americas, mayors from around the world see many of the same pressures on our residents: rising costs, extreme heat, housing insecurity and displacement,” said Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr of Freetown.

Two of those pressures ran through much of the week. The first was energy. Data centers are generating new demands for electricity grids, and not all of that additional capacity is coming from clean sources. City leaders are trying to influence how that growth unfolds. As of Climate Week, 49 cities representing more than 110 million people backed the Global Urban Data Centres Pact, convened by C40 Cities. The pact calls for cleaner and more efficient data centers and for projects to provide benefits to the communities where they are built. Recent polling cited by C40 found that when data centers integrate clean energy, net public support swings from minus 33 points to plus 16. For advocates of ‘35x35,’ that is a useful data point: electrification wins public backing when people can see what it does for them.

The second was heat. Through the C40 Cool Cities Accelerator, New York City has secured USD 350,000 to expand its cooling-pop-up program for outdoor workers across all five boroughs in 2026. In Miami, Mayor Eileen Higgins says data from 156 heat sensors is helping to identify neighborhoods at higher risk before extreme heat arrives.

“Give cities the tools and resources to act, and we will deliver,” Aki-Sawyerr said.

From individual solutions to collective momentum

Climate Week NYC offered a glimpse of what a more practical phase of climate action can look like: not one breakthrough, but networks of cities, companies, investors and governments ensuring individual solutions scale and drive one another. That is the connective tissue of the Action Agenda and the test for COP31. The ultimate goal, said UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell during Climate Week NYC, is to “turn targets into pipelines, pipelines into bankable projects, and bankable projects into growth, security, and resilience so that COP31 delivers results.” Antalya will be the next place to see how far those connections have traveled.