Climate action: priced to sell?
At London Climate Action Week, searching beyond the business case
London Climate Action Week 2026 will be remembered not for any announcement or new consensus, but for taking place under a record-breaking heat dome. Headline writers couldn’t resist the punchline of an event on governance under extreme heat, called off because of … extreme heat. It’s almost too on the nose as a metaphor for the state of the climate transition and for the spectacle these global gatherings create.
For nearly 15 years, my job has been to study and shape the messaging of impact organizations, and I’ve put on countless panels and spent many sweaty days corralling higher-ups’ at sprawling convenings like LCAW. But this year, I attended simply as myself: an impact professional, writer, comms flack, and person who loves and increasingly worries about the natural world.
Since I relocated to Amsterdam from New York City late last year and transitioned to remote consulting, London felt like the right place to take the pulse of the climate dialogue and get that jolt of the zeitgeist in real time, the kind of energy that doesn’t transmit through a screen.
The shift from climate movement to sustainability industry
What I found, and what others shared with me, wasn’t a shock of new ideas or a rousing call to action. It was a creeping sense of business as usual that only gestured at the disruption racking the energy transition. At least in public, talk of war, shocks, and the all out assaults taking place on climate action was often rendered in euphemisms, and conversations quickly steered toward sector or solution specific dynamics.
This is, perhaps, not surprising. Thirty years into the global circuit of climate convenings, these gatherings are more like industry conferences than activist platforms. To paraphrase dozens of panel titles, we’re moving from awareness-raising and ambition-setting toward execution, deployment, and action. Meaning, this is serious business, not a place for sign-waving and hand-wringing.
In many ways, this signals progress: environmental issues are now widely acknowledged as critical to companies’ bottom lines and the functioning of cities and states, and so panels and events hone in on technical, policy, and market issues, like in any other mature industry. And despite the heated geopolitical rhetoric, money is still moving: global energy-transition investment hit a record $2.3 trillion in 2025, up 8% on the year, with even US investment rising as Washington pulled back.
But as the world absorbs its largest-ever oil shock and the US becomes even more hostile to climate goals, I had hoped to see some shift in the narrative, in the public-facing posture of leaders and institutions that reflects the harrowing moment we’ve approached, where two decades of consensus building and collaboration are being quickly reversed, just as we approach tipping points. Instead, I felt an uneasy sense of deja vu.
Purpose-driven business loses its halo
We’re long past the last decade’s manifesto of “doing well by doing good.” In that optimistic, heady era, our job as impact and sustainability practitioners was to make, share, and refine the “business case” that social responsibility and climate action actually benefit financial performance. As the concept gained traction, it appeared that even acolytes of Milton Friedman’s gospel of shareholder value had finally come around to the notion that enterprise owed something to the environment and communities. If, even then, the rush of declarations had a whiff of PR grabs, there was a sense of the tide turning.
The business case thesis may still be compelling, even if new studies point to more ambiguous outcomes. But I think it’s grown stale as a story. It certainly doesn’t seem to be galvanizing business and political leaders anymore, much less consumers and voters. The number of S&P 500 companies mentioning “ESG” on earnings calls has dropped to its lowest in years, off a 2021 peak, and global media coverage of climate fell 14% in 2025, now well below its high. In the US, while public concern is high, climate ranks low as a priority.
And yet markets-focused thinking still dominated the panels, conversations, and the recaps I followed. Over and over, the message was to stop talking about farmers and trees, and tell stories in terms finance types understand: infrastructure, innovation, returns, profit. But if a decades worth of reports, solutions, and information campaigns hasn’t proven the business case to senior decision makers, what will?
Even the language of material risk is losing ground to a softer imperative: less negativity. I heard panelists push the environment as opportunity, revenue, efficiencies, and, tellingly, urged the audience to cut anything that sounded like last decade’s climate pitch, part of a broader trend toward greenhushing.
In many rooms we’d dropped the pretense that markets will solve this at all, pivoting to “resilience” as the impacts worsen. Resilience for people and communities is vital and vastly underfunded; developing countries face an adaptation gap of hundreds of billions a year. But too often “resilience” seemed to mean business continuity, not help for the those most exposed, and a convenient cover for easing off now-politically-tricky messaging on emissions.
Reading the room
These are, of course, the perception of someone focused on stories and communications, and not a climate scientist or tech CEO, and not someone sitting in the closed-door sessions where deals are made and off-the-record opinions voiced. But conversations with former colleagues, peers, and friends reaffirmed my take on the overall mood, even if most attendees I spoke with seemed encouraged by their own events and engagements.
An executive in carbon markets told me the quiet sentiment in his sector is that we’ve reached the limits of what voluntary commitments can accomplish. A corporate fundraisers’ private dinner apparently focused on how sustainability discussions with boards and the C-suite face the same reluctance as 2016. A senior investor relations leader recounted that financial engineering is still trotted out as the marquee solution to lack of capital flowing into developing markets, perhaps a reflection of the host city’s home industry. When I raised the dire state of sustainability in the US during Q&As, a few people sought me out afterward, relieved that someone had named it.
Crowded out: what business case messaging misses
Of course, we need global business, capital, and policymakers on the side of the transition; they control and allocate the resources we need to reduce emissions and adapt to a warming planet. But the underlying message seems to be that the environment only matters if it can stand on its own as an asset, that there’s no place for awe, grief, reverence, or even human dignity in this more “serious” evolution of the climate movement. And that our best, perhaps only, option is to try (again and again) to appeal to the mercurial instincts of heavyweights of capital, production and political power, many of whom have shown themselves to be unreliable partners.
What do we lose when we reduce the climate crisis to a mere market failure?
First, this narrative forecloses a reckoning that feels overdue: that the systems we built aren’t working, or aren’t working at the scale we imagined, and that instruments and frameworks like the SDGs and the Paris pledges, along with these carbon-intensive gatherings themselves, may be outmoded against the pace of the crisis. Limits get breached and coalitions disintegrate, but the focus stays fixed on the perennial future, finding new tweaks to an otherwise unchanged economic model, hoping this time it will stick.
It also blurs out the faces of the people most affected, and pushes them out of decisions about their own futures. When the audience is global business, you have to speak in the scale they respond to, the tons and hectares and dollars of return that earn press and bring partners on board. There’s less and less room for the harder stories, communities erased, species lost, and nuanced trade-offs in front of us. Western, male, and traditionally credentialed voices remain overrepresented. And while women and youth climate champions are highlighted in PR campaigns, how many of them are also placed on panels with executives and politicians?
This thinking also builds an insular culture that speaks only to elites. Building new systems is complicated work that needs specialized expertise and funding, but complexity shouldn’t be an excuse for inaccessibility. Overreliance on jargon and buzzwords alienates the people we claim to serve and makes the whole subject feel irrelevant to everyone else. For example, I think carbon markets are easy to dismiss as greenwashing scams because practically the only legible public information about them has been investigative reporting into worthless or overstated credits.
Seeds of new climate narratives, with teeth
Fortunately, a few voices are breaking the holding pattern, meeting this volatile moment by connecting climate to the wider web of crises around it rather than retreating.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, opened the week by naming something that most still tiptoe around: that climate progress is under coordinated attack. His new City Climate Facts initiative treats disinformation as a frontline problem, armed with uncomfortable numbers, among them a finding that as much as 48% of online engagement on some cities’ air-quality policies is bot-driven. He framed it bluntly, as “an existential fight between the climate wreckers and the climate defenders.”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres tied the oil shock from the war in Iran, and looming fears about AI, directly to the climate conversation, a reminder of how attached the world remains to fossil fuels. He pressed AI companies to be more transparent about how their data centers are powered, telling the industry it was “time to come clean.” I think this warning resonated because it came with an image rather than a metric: the planet’s tipping points, he said, are like objects in a car mirror, closer than they appear.
Michael Bloomberg also announced a $285 million commitment not simply to finance clean energy, but to strengthen the industry’s political muscles through industry associations, technical expertise, and the capacity to challenge the fossil fuel industry’s decades-old influence machine. It was a tacit acknowledgment that cheaper renewables alone won’t win the transition without comparable investments in power, persuasion, and public legitimacy, and perhaps that the climate movement has surrendered some of its campaigning instinct as it has professionalized.
Each named an antagonist, connected the crisis to things people already feel – like the price of energy or the integrity of what they read – and led with provocation instead of sanitized talking points. But these are globally-recognized leaders engaging with climate as part of wide-ranging platforms. Their titles and public positions enable them to take risks and name names in a way that fundraisers, entrepreneurs, and junior employees cannot, and also guarantee press coverage, social reach, and access to the most rarefied circles.
The Remit: crisis comms for the climate
How can we help others speak with clarity and candor, including and especially to those who control capital, power, and influence? How do we get more people to be not just more informed, but actually engaged and even excited about what’s still possible? And what does “crisis comms” look like for the climate, with campaigns and messaging that are immediately legible, actionable, and still rigorous, in a media environment built around virality, outrage, and shallow engagement?
That’s what I want to explore here: across development, sustainability, and climate, what storytelling, narrative, and brand actually mean now. Moments like LCAW are good for taking stock, but I also want to zoom out, to look at how media and image-making collide with questions of purpose, values, and impact, for people, organizations and their leaders, and at how these industries and movements might remake themselves in public for an era of AI, media fragmentation, and accelerating shocks. And maybe, along the way, rescue some of the spirit and hope that pulled a lot of us into this work in the first place.