It’s easy to feel more pessimistic about the climate crisis than ever. And yet, here we are, heading into Climate Week NYC 2026.

Indeed, 62% of Americans now say the world will not do enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change, according to Pew Research Center, a sharp rise in pessimism, up nine percentage points since 2022. At the same time, global investment in the energy transition hit a record $2.3 trillion in 2025 , up 8% from the year before, according to BloombergNEF, including a 3.5% increase in U.S. investment.

Betting Big At Climate Week NYC

This year’s Emerald Summit, the flagship event from fintech platform Wallet Max, landed right in the middle of that contradiction. Focused on the intersection of capital, artificial intelligence, renewables and climate, the summit convenes investors, founders and policy leaders as an official part of Climate Week NYC 2026. Founder Bhuva Shakti told me in an interview that she built the event around a simple bet: the businesses that treat climate risk as a core strategy, and not an afterthought, are the ones that will last. “If businesses don’t take care of climate challenges as part of their global strategy, they won’t have sustainable long-term success,” Shakti said.

The tension between apprehension and resolve ran through the day. Karen Gamba, the summit’s producer and CEO of the ExV Agency, put words to the mood many attendees walked in with. “We are living in a society where everything is very alarmist, it’s very negative, and people are feeling this immense pressure about what is happening when it comes to our groceries and prices and gas and AI,” Gamba told me in an interview. “‘Are we going to lose our jobs?’ ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Are we replaceable by technology?’ What I believe this summit is going to do is show us that this is not the end, but this is the beginning of something new.”

Betsy Fore, a venture capitalist who founded Velveteen Ventures, which she shared is the first Native American woman-led fund in the nation, hears the same alarm bells Gamba described, and refuses to despair. “There’s so much doom and gloom and dread around it that I like to view things with a childlike wonder,” Fore said to me when I interviewed her. Her optimism isn’t abstract. She’s built her firm around it, betting on the generation now coming of age (a bet other speakers, including closing keynote speaker Peter Fusaro, made too). “The reason that we focus on children and planet and climate in particular is because the next generations, their number one concern is actually the health of the planet,” she said. “So I have a lot of hope.”

That same throughline—hope as a mechanism for success—showed up on the finance side of the summit too. Shameek Bose, vice president of global impact at Okta, reflected on his own fireside chat by naming what he sees as the real bottleneck in climate finance (it’s not technology): who gets access to capital and why. “The key to unlocking that is really empathy,” Bose told me in an interview. “You know, ‘How does a forest fire in Canada affect me?’ And all of a sudden, you look up in the sky and your sky is red. How fragile and interconnected and small the world is is demonstrated by climate change.” Having that empathy, he said, is what actually moves investment dollars toward the innovators who need them.

The day also featured a dynamic opening keynote from sustainability-centered entrepreneur Alissa Miky, as well as remarks from industry experts Neha Arora, Parichat Wrolstad, Sacha Awwa, Eric Williams and Scott Ryan, speaking across topics from blended finance to marketing for climate-tech founders, evidence of how wide a net the summit cast in a single day.

Climate Week NYC’s $215 Trillion Upside

The day ended with a powerful closing keynote from Peter Fusaro of Founder of Global Change Associates, who didn’t pull any punches. He ran through the litany of bad news: more intense storms, worsening droughts and flooding, increasing forest fires, species loss, rising seas, declining fish catches. And he framed it as the setup for an extremely urgent business case, pointing to a $215 trillion market opportunity in climate solutions through 2050. Climate tech startups already number in the tens of thousands, some 78,000 in the U.S. and 66,000 more in India. His final call to action: don’t quit before the miracle.

Shakti’s own bar for success is humbler than a market projection, and arguably far more useful. If people leave the summit on Friday and are still thinking about one small action they can take in their community on Monday, then that’s success—not fixing the whole planet all at once, just doing what we can this Monday, then the next, and the next. Everyone who shows up for Climate Week NYC this year, and, really, every leader who claims to care what happens to us next , would do well to hold themselves to the same standard.