Experiencing Climate Solutions in New York City
After living through the hottest summer on record, leaders from across sectors and the world will gather at Climate Week NYC from September 17–24 to accelerate climate action.
New York City's climate community will host various events throughout the week, and more than ever, they will be bringing New York-grown solutions to the table. Activate and its partners will demonstrate how the emerging hard-tech ecosystem in the New York City region is driving the energy transition—not just by telling, but by showing.
“We experience climate change every day now,” says Andrew Chang, managing director of the Activate New York Community. “So let's experience the solutions.”
Activate is hosting and/or sponsoring a series of thought-leadership-driven gatherings during the week, including a showcase of Activate Fellow technologies followed by a fireside chat between Evelyn Wang, director of ARPA-E, and national public radio host and journalist Molly Wood. Activate is also excited to co-sponsor Newlab’s all-day event, NEW CLIMATE FUTURES, on Thursday, September 21, at Newlab’s Brooklyn Navy Yard location. This event will feature a keynote by Activate’s CFO, Matt Price, on climate innovation in action.
“Climate Week is a powerful moment for feeling optimism that we can solve challenges associated with a changing climate.”
New York City’s Burgeoning Climate-Tech Ecosystem
Activate New York Managing Director Andrew Chang introducing the newest fellows in the Activate New York community.
“New York is quickly becoming the best place to build a climate company,” says Chang. “I don't think I would have said that two years ago.” Despite this, Chang says the biggest misperception about New York’s innovation ecosystem is that it doesn’t even exist.
New York is a powerful center for finance and global business and a hub of talent and academic excellence, with universities like Columbia, CUNY, NYU, and Stony Brook cultivating technical and IP expertise.
Before, scientists and engineers would often leave the city after graduating. But as the hard-tech ecosystem develops, more and more STEM talent is staying in or gravitating back to New York.
State and local leadership has jumpstarted climate innovation. According to New York State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, passed in 2019, the program “empowers every New Yorker to fight climate change at home, at work, and in their communities.” Locally, the City of New York's Climate Mobilization Act of 2019 includes the U.S.’s first-ever carbon tax—Local Law 97, which places emission limits on buildings—to be deployed next year.
Simultaneously, a growing local ecosystem has emerged to nurture hard-tech innovation. The Activate New York Community, one of Activate’s five fellowship communities across the country, supports New York-based science entrepreneurs largely focused on decarbonization. Many other ecosystem partners offer different angles of support for climate-tech founders. Newlab, founded in 2016, turned a historical shipbuilding facility, once belonging to the U.S. Navy, into infrastructure for climate-tech innovation—carving out substantial physical space to support startups who are building and scaling critical climate technologies within New York City.
Fellows in the Activate New York Community explore Newlab as part of weekly programming activities.
After witnessing over 200 companies build technology and grow from Newlab, its director of strategy, Sahil Jain, believes New York offers one-of-a-kind testing and partnering opportunities. “There's really no other place where you can both build a living lab but have the ability to also attract potential users and customers and other types of value chain partners all in one area like you can in New York,” he says.
Chang sees New York City’s cultural diversity as another unique benefit. “The other thing that I like about New York, and the climate scene here, is that it's a lot more diverse. So you see a lot more women, you see a lot more people of color,” says Chang. “There's a lot of diversity in New York City, and I think you're seeing that in the climate community, too.”
“New York has always been a hub for brilliant minds across sectors, but historically, it’s been a tough place for hard-tech, given space limitations,” says Ashika Kalra, head of special projects at Collab Fund, an Activate partner and co-sponsor of the Activate Demo Hall at Climate Week NYC. “Recent investment from the private and public sectors has catalyzed research in the sector, creating initiatives such as creating lab space in Brooklyn. Now, the state is a leading force in attracting top-tier talent and funding.”
Less Talking, More Doing at Climate Week NYC
This year, Activate will co-host two events at Climate Week NYC: a carbon dioxide removal happy hour on Monday, September 18, and the Activate Demo Hall on Wednesday, September 20 at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, co-hosted by Activate, Impact Science Ventures, Mercury, Open Air, DCVC, Collaborative Fund, and in partnership with Newlab and Paradigm Counsel.
“Instead of talking about climate solutions, we wanted to show climate solutions,” says Chang about the Activate Demo Hall. “We want our friends in the community to come and meet the innovators but also touch and see some of the prototypes that are being built now.”
Ashley Beckwith (FORAY Bioscience, Cohort 2022) will be displaying the world’s first lab-grown tree cell culture for bio-oils extraction at the Activate Demo Hall during Climate Week NYC.
Two first-of-their-kind innovations will be on display: the world’s first measurable carbon dioxide removal technology, developed by Garrett Boudinot (Vycarb, Cohort 2022), which has the potential to become a multi-gigaton-scale drawdown pathway; and the world’s first lab-grown tree cell culture for bio-oils extraction, developed by Ashley Beckwith (FORAY Bioscience, Cohort 2022), which could eliminate deforestation from supply chains.
Garrett Boudinot (Vycarb, Cohort 2022) will be displaying the world’s first measurable carbon dioxide removal technology at the Activate Demo Hall during Climate Week NYC.
“The Activate Demo Hall will serve as a powerful reminder that a cleaner, carbon-neutral future is not just possible but actively in progress,” says Kalra of Collab Fund, a proud partner of Activate through the Shared Future Fund.
On Thursday, the NEW CLIMATE FUTURES event will center on collaboration and mobilizing action. “We don't just want this to be another day about talking about the macro-level challenges that the world faces and that we've been talking about for years,” says Jain of Newlab. “Let this day be about mobilizing action and structuring collaborations around recognized climate challenges by compounding our networks' capabilities, resources, and expertise.”
This event will be the only place in New York—or maybe anywhere—where you will be able to interact with an electric plane, a heat pump, and an ammonia-powered tractor. In the same “show not tell” spirit of the Activate’s Demo Hall, NEW CLIMATE FUTURES will feature operating prototypes throughout Newlab’s 84,000-square-foot building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
“Climate Week is a powerful moment for feeling optimism that we can solve challenges associated with a changing climate,” says Price. “We have the scientific tools, we have financial and policy leaders, and we have entrepreneurs coming together to find alignment in how to best bring more sustainable solutions to society.”
The Future of Climate Tech in New York
What’s next for New York’s ecosystem? “I do think we will become much, much more capable as a city and region in early-stage technology development in terms of resources—both capital resources and other types of resources, like test beds and sandbox environments,” says Jain of Newlab. “I think New York will increasingly become more coordinated in its ability to help early-stage technology companies validate their solutions and will therefore become a technical hub where you can deploy first-of-its-kind technology.”
“New York is quickly becoming the best place to build a climate company.”
Chang thinks we will see even more mining startups, a category that is already dominating the climate-tech ecosystem in New York. He says that New York is not the region most people imagine when they think of the mining industry. “But New York City is where a lot of the action is for critical minerals supply chain for new extraction and processing technologies,” he says. “It's happening here.”
In terms of New York’s role in the energy transition, Chang also predicts that New York will create crucial new financing pathways. “There’s a lot of capital here, and I think [the different types of capital in New York] are going to be more and more important as we get to the later stages of funding this energy transition—these startups are not going to be VC all the way.”
Climate Week NYC is an opportunity for urgent, coordinated action, which is more important than ever. “We need to take action today. We don't have time for moon shots,” says Jain. “We need to do things that can be deployed at a seven-year horizon at the maximum, but really more like in the next five years. We need to align ourselves with strategic partners that have that same level of urgency.”
“It’s not just going to be this ecosystem—it's going to be a lot of different ecosystems,” says Chang. “[New York] will be one of those anchoring ones.”
Attendees at Activate’s Carbon Management Happy Hour event during 2022’s Climate Week NYC.
Fellows and members of the Activate ecosystem mingle in Midtown following an Activate event during 2022’s Climate Week NYC.
Interested in joining the Activate New York Community? Applications for Cohort 2024 open on September 19. Sign up to receive exclusive updates about the recruitment process.