Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership Chief Innovation Officer James Cole, and Corporate Leaders Group Europe Director Ursula Woodburn report on a hectic Climate Week New York

Last week heads of state met in New York for the 81st UN General Assembly (UNGA), the last for Secretary-General António Guterres. He used it to call on every country to set a roadmap, with clear timelines, for the transition away from fossil fuels.

The tone Guterres tried to set was that the climate agenda is now about implementation and cooperation. Though the U.S. President's remarks highlighted continuing differences of opinion on climate action and the role of multilateral institutions in addressing global challenges.

Reflecting that focus on implementation, the UN Climate Summit launched a Global Grids Accelerator, starting in Africa and Southeast Asia, where more than 2,500 gigawatts of renewables await grid connection, alongside a critical minerals initiative intended to help producer countries retain more economic value and jobs.

At a side event, Gordon Brown, former UK Prime Minister, and 100 former heads of state and government called for the UN Charter to be updated to cover climate change, women's rights, global south disparities and AI.

During Climate Week NYC, a global convening moment that takes place alongside UNGA, cooperation was also a recognisable theme as businesses, investors, academics, policymakers and innovators gathered across the city.

The focus in corporate sustainability has notably changed, perhaps even for the better. There were fewer discussions centred on new commitments and positioning and more conversations grounded in resilience, competitiveness, supply chains, collaboration and implementation.

This reinforces the central argument of CISL's latest paper, Making Markets Fit for the Future, which argues that scaling sustainability solutions requires building the market infrastructure around them, demanding coordinated action from businesses, policymakers, investors and civil society.

Climate Week itself continues to grow, but what stood out most was the determination to focus on practical ways to accelerate progress.

The Climate Week opening ceremony set the tone. From resilience and energy security to competitiveness and growth, speakers repeatedly framed climate action not simply as an environmental imperative, but as an economic one.

UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband argued that recent geopolitical shocks had exposed the risks of dependence on imported fossil fuels, reinforcing the case for investment in clean energy, electrification and grid infrastructure. Similar themes were echoed by Iceland's Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, highlighting how climate, economic resilience and energy security are becoming increasingly intertwined.

Place-based action also featured strongly, echoing CISL's own work on collective leadership, from country-level platforms in Africa to Cambridge City Climate Leaders Group and Living Lab approach.

At Goals House, we joined Ezgi Barcenas of L'Oréal, Rebecca Boudreaux of Oberon Fuels and Joseph Ssentongo of the Global Innovation Fund to discuss how solutions scale, drawing on CISL's accelerator partnership with L'Oréal. Oberon's pivot to sustainable propellants for the beauty industry demonstrated how policy can create markets for more sustainable solutions, while corporate willingness to pay an initial green premium helps de-risk innovation and bring it to scale.

Equally important were policy discussions convened by CISL and its partners. At a CLG UK roundtable hosted with Cambridge spin-out, Neutreeno and UK Government representatives, discussion focused on implementation in an increasingly fragmented policy landscape and the need for stable frameworks that can unlock long-term investment.

Similar themes emerged during a CLG Europe and B Team business leaders' roundtable with European Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra. The strongest message was that Europe's transition is increasingly being understood as a competitiveness, resilience and strategic-independence agenda. Climate policy, industrial strategy, energy security and economic growth are becoming increasingly intertwined, as geopolitical shocks reinforce the case for clean energy and reduced dependence on imported fossil fuels. Businesses were not calling for weaker ambition, but for predictable policy frameworks that support first movers, unlock investment and accelerate implementation.

Across these discussions there was a consistent message: the challenge is increasingly not innovation, but scale. Whether the topic was electrification, industrial decarbonisation, nature restoration or circularity, participants focused on the market conditions, infrastructure and policy certainty needed to accelerate deployment.

Food systems provided an important reminder that not every challenge is equally mature. While climate and energy transition pathways are increasingly well understood, food and agriculture remain deeply place-based, shaped by diet, culture and competing land-use pressures, with far less agreement on the route forward. Yet here too, the challenge is increasingly about creating the conditions for solutions to scale. CISL is actively developing a Food Systems Resilience Accelerator to address this issue.

One of the clearest messages from Climate Week was that climate policy is increasingly being discussed through the lens of competitiveness, resilience and economic security. Countries that can align climate ambition with industrial strategy, clean energy and investment will be best placed to attract capital, accelerate innovation and build the industries of the future.

The real test now is what happens after New York: whether governments can translate this growing consensus into the policy certainty, infrastructure investment and market frameworks needed to accelerate implementation at home, and how that ambition is reflected in international forums, including COP31.