In September 2024, NCRP’s Senior Movement Engagement Manager for Climate Change Senowa Mize-Fox and NCRP’s Research and Development Associate Spencer Ozer attended New York City Climate Week. Climate Week is a series of events sponsored by The Climate Group that aims to bring together actors from all different sectors with a shared vision of tackling the complicated and multifaceted issues of the climate crisis. In this special 2-Part blog post, you will hear from Ozer and Mize-Fox as they recount their key takeaways from their time at Climate Week 2024. This is part 2 of 2.
This year was my third and Spencer’s first Climate Week, and it was the largest in terms of attendance by a wide margin compared to the last two years I attended. Our primary focus of the week was to promote the first part of a three-part research project NCRP is working on with the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) and the Tishman School for Environment and Design called the Just Returns Project. The first iteration of this body of work focuses on the investments of the top 50 climate funders according to the Donors of Color Network Climate Justice Funding Pledge and how they line up with those funders’ statements on justice and equity. You can read the first part of the report here.
In addition to promoting this work, Spencer and I attended several movement and/or funder centered events related to our climate justice work at NCRP.
I spend a lot of time in my work organizing philanthropy and bringing attention to what the climate justice movement calls false solutions: “solutions” to the climate crisis that are often technocratic and grounded in our market driven capitalist economic system. False solutions are usually created and implemented by those who platform themselves as experts when it comes to mitigating and/or adapting to the climate crisis. They are well funded at a disproportionate rate to strategies and tactics that are developed and practiced by those on the frontlines of this crisis. Those who are most impacted.
Anecdotally, here is a sentiment amongst frontline led organizations that Climate Week is a waste of time and not representative of their organizing work. Conversely, Climate Week is also more accessible for those in the US than major global climate summits like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: Conference of Parties (UNFCC COP), which also happens in the fall. Last year, COP was hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan, an oil rich country in Central