Peter Zeitlin, Amer Sports: Reflections from New York Climate Week and UNGA 2026

Sustainability can't be an isolated island, writes Peter Zeitlin following Climate Week NYC and UNGA 2026.

Less enthusiasm about big pledges, more hard questions about what is actually working.

Climate Week in New York this year had a different tone than before. Across the week, from the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit to smaller sessions on decarbonization, supply chains, and target-setting, the mood wasn't defeatist, but it was sober.

Sustainability is under pressure, but not retreating

Several speakers were direct about the fact that sustainability work has gotten harder. Geopolitical volatility, resource constraints, AI's growing energy demands, and shifting policy landscapes are all adding friction.

However, it was interesting to see how consistently speakers pushed back on the idea that pressure is a reason to pull back. The more common framing was that treating each new pressure point (political, regulatory, economic, physical) as grounds to disconnect sustainability from the core business is itself the strategic mistake.

The companies that will come out ahead are the ones that connect growth and sustainability, rather than treating them as competing priorities.

Systems don't change by accident, they are designed

The second day of the Leaders Summit opened with a plenary titled "Systems Don't Change by Accident, They Are Designed". This idea ran through nearly every session I attended that week, well beyond that one panel.

Target-setting itself is a good example. SBTi's new standard, broadening options for how targets are set, building out an implementation hierarchy, working through how interdependencies are counted, is a live example of a system being deliberately rebuilt rather than left as-is. And the debate about whether that rebuild goes far enough is part of the same story: one view argues the system needs to start from value creation rather than treating emissions reduction as the default starting point.

The same idea showed up in the discussion of capital markets, where speakers described today's financial system as being built for a different era, one that doesn't yet reflect the scale of capital reallocation the sustainability transition requires. And it showed up again in the supply chain conversation, where the call was for industry-wide data platforms and collective standards rather than every company solving fragmentation on its own.

Looking forward

Ultimately, none of this resolves itself. It requires deliberate design choices, from how a company sets targets, to how it finances suppliers, to how industries choose to collaborate on data.

If there's one thing that ties all of this together it's that sustainability can't be an isolated island. It has to sit inside every function of the business instead of running alongside it as its own separate thing. And despite everything the week surfaced about how hard this can be, I came away more optimistic than I expected to.

People are genuinely aligned that something needs to happen here. Regulations will keep shifting, administrations will change, geopolitical tensions will flare up and settle down again as they always do. But the science doesn't move. That's why we must keep pushing this work forward, not only as a climate issue, but as a question of social welfare too.