Next week, more than 100,000 people will descend on New York City for more than 1,000 events during Climate Week. By one measure, that extraordinary turnout is a sign of success. By another, it raises an uncomfortable question: after years of summits, pledges and packed conference rooms, why does the climate crisis keep getting worse?
The last 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record. In 2024, the world experienced its first calendar year more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, and scientists expect the longer-term average to cross that threshold within the next decade. Just last month, a catastrophic glacier collapse and flood in Nepal killed more than 1,300 people and left thousands missing, with scientists concluding that climate change made the conditions behind the disaster more likely. In Europe, at least 35,000 more people died because of excess heat this past summer, driven by our quickly warming climate.
Against that backdrop, it is easy to look at another Climate Week and ask whether all this convening has failed.
But that misses an important counterfactual: where would the world be today without a decade of governments, companies, investors and others pushing climate action forward? When the Paris agreement was adopted in 2015, the world was headed toward roughly 3 to 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming. Today, national policies already in place put the world on a roughly 2.8-degree path. Full implementation of countries’ existing climate pledges would lower that further, to about 2.3 to 2.5 degrees. That is still dangerously far from where we need to be. But it is also meaningful progress from where we were a decade ago.
If we’re going to talk about failure, let’s be clear-eyed about where we’ve fallen short. Climate action has produced tangible results, but it hasn’t moved nearly fast enough. One area that has not received the attention and financing needed is the preservation of nature.
There is no path to achieving climate goals that does not run through nature. Forests, wetlands and mangroves store carbon at scale, buffer storm surge, and stabilize the soils and waters that economies depend on. The world’s oceans alone absorb around 30% of all climate emissions each year. Nature is climate infrastructure. It is also the least-funded part of the system.
As a veteran of past Climate Weeks, I expect to hear a familiar refrain from participants: we need more money for conservation and climate action. But this year, a harder reality deserves equal attention: what do we do as public money for climate and nature is drying up?
Government funding everywhere is under growing pressure, and nowhere is that dependence on public funds greater than investments in nature. Public budgets have supplied roughly 80% of nature finance since 2010. Private investment is growing—more than $14 billion flowed into nature in 2025—but remains nowhere close to the scale required. Global climate, biodiversity and land conservation goals require around $570 billion in annual investment in nature by 2030.
Simply passing the hat around again is not going to close that gap.
Public finance remains indispensable, particularly for communities and projects that cannot or should not generate commercial returns. But in an era of scarcity, we need every public dollar to work harder for us. The strongest finance models will make limited public dollars multiply, generate returns that can be reinvested and reward investments that prevent losses before they hit balance sheets. Nature is where those models are most needed, and where several are already being tested.
Leverage is key. Too often, public money goes toward paying for one project, one time. A stronger model uses limited public capital to absorb risks that commercial investors cannot comfortably bear, prepare projects for investment or otherwise improve their risk-return profile. Each public dollar can then pull additional private dollars into the deal.
The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a global fund for forest conservation launched at COP30 last year, is an innovative way to leverage public finance for nature. Its structure aims to combine $25 billion in government sponsor capital with up to $100 billion from institutional investors. Government capital will take more of the risk, helping backstop bonds sold to pension funds and other large institutional investors. Those investors receive a conventional financial return, while the financing supports payments to tropical forest countries and Indigenous Peoples and local communities. At full scale, one public dollar could mobilize roughly four private dollars to keep tropical forests standing.
Durability matters, too. Traditional grants eventually run out. Many major conservation and climate funds periodically return to governments for replenishment, exposing long-term investments to short-term fiscal and political cycles.
The TFFF addresses this by borrowing from the university endowment model: invest the capital, spend part of the returns and preserve the fund so it can keep generating income. Its capital is invested, with returns funding payments to tropical forest countries and a portion retained to compound. Over time, those retained earnings are intended to grow enough to repay government sponsors with interest while leaving a functioning fund behind. That kind of structure is better suited to climate and conservation challenges that will outlast any single budget cycle.
Insurance offers another opportunity. Natural catastrophes caused an estimated $220 billion in global economic damages in 2025. Roughly half of losses from natural hazards worldwide are uninsured. In many emerging economies, 80% to 90% of catastrophic losses have no insurance coverage at all. Meanwhile, investments in adaptation and resilience can yield as much as $10 in benefits and avoided costs for every dollar spent.
That creates an opportunity to bring insurers into resilience investment before disaster strikes. Insurers already have a direct financial stake in lower losses and much of what lowers those losses is natural. Two stretches of coastline hit by the same storm do not generate the same claims if one still has natural protections such as mangroves. Effective resilience measures can protect property, reduce expected claims and help preserve insurability.
The insurance industry should become a partner in prevention by helping quantify the financial value of reduced risk, incorporating verified resilience measures into underwriting and pricing, and supporting investments that lower future losses. Where resilience produces measurable savings, those savings can help create an economic return for the parties that financed it.
Leverage, durability, insurance—these are the watchwords I hope to hear in conversations throughout Climate Week. The measure of the week should not be how many people show up or how many panels fill conference rooms. It should be whether the people who control capital leave with better ways to turn commitments into investment and investment into measurable results.
Different projects will need different structures, and some investments will always depend on public funding. But wherever credible revenue, savings or other financial value exists, scarce public dollars should help bring much larger pools of private capital to the table.
Climate Week has helped build a global constituency for action. To turn more of that momentum into implementation, we must confront our financial reality and get creative about how we use the money that remains. Scarcity should force us to spend smarter, not think smaller.
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