Nature Has Finally Arrived at the Climate Table

This week, New York City is hosting the largest Climate Week in its history. More than 100,000 people are expected across roughly 1,000 events running from 20 to 27 September alongside the United Nations General Assembly, which brings heads of state and government ministers to the city at the same time. The combination makes this week one of the most concentrated gatherings of climate decision-makers on the planet.

For years, the criticism of Climate Week was that it was heavy on energy transition, finance, and technology, and thin on nature. Forests, oceans, biodiversity, and the ecosystems that underpin everything else were routinely treated as a side conversation, not a central one.

That is changing this year. And it matters more than it might sound.

Why Nature Keeps Getting Left Out

The separation between climate action and nature conservation is one of the more frustrating structural problems in the way global environmental policy works. They have largely been treated as distinct fields with distinct funding streams, distinct conferences, and distinct communities of advocates. Climate people work on emissions. Conservation people work on species and habitat. The fact that these are deeply intertwined, that forests regulate rainfall, that healthy oceans absorb vast quantities of carbon, that biodiversity loss makes ecosystems fragile and less capable of buffering climate extremes, has been acknowledged at the level of rhetoric for years without being fully reflected in policy or finance.

This week, Nature4Climate, a coalition of more than 40 organisations, is hosting the Nature Hub at Climate Week NYC on 23 September at KPMG's New York offices. It is a full day of discussions built around a single question: how do we move from recognising nature's value to actually embedding it within the systems that drive investment, policy, and economic decision-making?

The framing is significant. "Recognising nature's value" is where the conversation has been stuck for most of the past decade. Virtually everyone agrees that forests, wetlands, mangroves, and coral reefs are important. The gap has been in the mechanisms that would actually protect them at scale.

The Money Is Starting to Move

One of the more striking data points circulating ahead of this week is from the Gaining Ground: State of Private Investment in Nature 2026 report, published jointly by Forest Trends and The Nature Conservancy. It found that more than $60 billion has been invested in nature-focused opportunities over the past decade, with annual investment increasing five-fold since 2016. Investors have signalled more than $180 billion in capital targeted for deployment in the years ahead.

Those are large numbers. They also need context. The investment required to halt biodiversity loss and protect sufficient natural habitat runs into the trillions annually, and the gap between current flows and what is actually needed remains enormous. The five-fold increase from 2016 reflects growth from a very low base.

But the direction of travel matters. For most of the last decade, the argument that investing in nature was financially rational, not simply ethically desirable, was being made mostly by conservationists to sceptical audiences. The fact that it is now being made by financial institutions, development banks, and corporate boards, and backed by capital commitments, represents a genuine shift in the conversation.

The Nature Hub's morning programme will focus on mobilising finance for forests, including carbon markets, the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, and how to align supply-chain finance with deforestation-free production. The afternoon turns to the concept of nature as critical infrastructure, which positions intact ecosystems not as an environmental amenity but as a prerequisite for economic stability, water security, and climate resilience.

A major new assessment called The State of Forest Carbon 2026 from Chloris Geospatial, drawing on 26 years of satellite observations of how forests are losing, retaining, and recovering carbon, will have its first public presentation at the Nature Hub. The findings are under embargo until 23 September.

The Road to CBD COP17

One reason the nature conversation is gaining urgency this week is what's coming next. CBD COP17 is approaching, and the pressure to demonstrate progress on the Global Biodiversity Framework, which sets a target of protecting 30% of the world's land and ocean by 2030, is mounting.

The 30x30 target sounds simple. The implementation is not. Progress on the land side has been uneven, with some countries making genuine strides and others barely moving. The ocean side is even more patchy, with less than 8% of the global ocean currently under any formal protection and less than 3% fully protected from harmful activities.

Which makes it all the more jarring when policy moves in the opposite direction.

The Gap Between the Room and the Law

On 1 September, the US House of Representatives passed H.R. 9436, the Northeast Lobsterman Protection Act of 2026. It extends an existing moratorium on new regulations designed to protect the North Atlantic right whale, pushing any updated protections back to 2035, a total delay of seven years beyond the current pause, which was already scheduled to expire in 2028.

The North Atlantic right whale is one of the most endangered large whale species on Earth. Approximately 380 individuals remain, including around 70 reproductive females. The species can sustain fewer than one human-caused death per year before population decline accelerates. Entanglement in fishing gear is the primary cause of injury and death, and a federal court has already ruled that current regulations violate the Endangered Species Act.

Conservation groups were unambiguous in their response. Defenders of Wildlife called it "a likely death sentence for some North Atlantic right whales." Oceana called it "an extinction bill, plain and simple." The bill now moves to the Senate, where advocates are cautiously optimistic it will not pass as a standalone measure.

The right whale vote is a useful reminder of the distance between the conversations happening in New York this week and the decisions actually being made in legislative chambers. Progress in the room is one thing. What happens in the laws that govern specific animals and specific places is another.

What This Week Is Actually For

Climate Week NYC does not make policy. It does not pass laws or move budgets. What it does is shape the conversation that precedes those things: what investors think is worth funding, what governments think is worth committing to, what companies think their peers expect of them.

By that measure, the growing prominence of nature in this year's programme is genuinely meaningful. The conversations happening on 23 September about forest finance, ocean governance, freshwater restoration, and the economics of biodiversity will not directly save a right whale or a river red gum. But they contribute to the political and financial conditions under which those specific protections become more or less likely.

The question that the Nature Hub is built around this year, how to move from recognising nature's value to embedding it in the systems that actually govern our economies, is the right one. It just happens to be one that has been asked before. This week, the pressure to answer it with something more durable than good intentions is more acute than ever.