Climate Week NYC 2025: Trends and Signals for the Food Industry

Risk, Resilience, and Shifts in Corporate Priorities

Conversations among CEOs and C-suite leaders revealed that climate change is no longer just a sustainability issue—it is being viewed as a critical business risk directly threatening the viability of supply chains.

Direct Threat to Supply

Major players are seeing the loss of arable farming land, especially for key ingredients like coffee and cacao, hitting their supply chains at scale. This direct, tangible risk is elevating the conversation to the highest levels of corporate planning.

Risk as a Financial Driver

The looming risk of ingredient scarcity (like coffee predicted to hit $20 a cup within ten years) is driving capital into climate solutions. This isn't just about corporate social responsibility anymore; it's about prevention and securing future supply. Companies realize that investing in climate solutions now is a prerogative to front-load costs and avoid putting an unbearable financial burden on future generations.

The Insurance Angle and De-Risking

The most tangible outcome of the focus on resilience is the direct involvement of the insurance sector. Insurers are engaging with bottom-up data to understand how regenerative practices act as a mechanism to de-risk farms and regional supply chains against extreme weather events like floods and droughts. This data is key to informing new risk-adjusted financial models and products for resilient farming.

Scaling Regenerative Agriculture and Place-Centric Solutions

Regenerative agriculture and food systems are growing at an unprecedented, exponential scale. This year’s Climate Week saw an advanced focus on landscape-level solutions, with particular attention to place-based strategy.

Unprecedented Growth of Regen Ag

Data shows a clear hockey stick of growth in regenerative agriculture, with the number of farms using the term regenerative for the first time overtaking the number of other organizations. View the report from HowGood and Kiss the Ground.

Major Commitments in Motion

Large corporations like ADM are not just setting—they're hitting—their multi-million-acre regenerative agriculture targets, proving that motion and scale are now a reality. 

Focus on Place-Centric Approaches

‍The industry is moving away from top-down, global programs and toward place-centric, landscape-level solutions. This involves honing in on a particular bioregion, understanding its unique cultural and economic situation, and tailoring programs by listening to the farmers on the ground.

Blended Capital Stacks

The place-centric approach is key to unlocking blended capital financing. Investments are now coming not just from corporate budgets, but also from international and local banks, insurance companies, local governments, and philanthropies, weaving together a financial stack that can truly transition food systems.

Dominance of Bottom-Up Carbon Accounting

The conversation has decidedly moved from whether bottom-up accounting is wise to 'how' to implement it at scale.

Product-Level Footprinting as the industry standard‍

‍Product carbon footprints, following established methodologies (like the GHG Protocol Product Standard and ISO 14067), are no longer "pie-in-the-sky." They are a real, scalable technology that is possible and useful. The alignment of ISO and GHG Protocol further underlines this shift.

High-Fidelity Footprinting

Excitement now lies in measuring the granular data that underpins PCFs. This includes on-the-ground practices like cover cropping and intercropping that lead to carbon removals, reductions and even resilience, and is critical to accurate supply chain emissions measurement. 

Proven technology

With bottom-up accounting technology now stable and scalable, the collective focus is shifting to, “What else can we use this technology and data to solve?” beyond just Scope 3 measurement and corporate accounting. The unlock for reduction strategy is being seen across the board.

Regulatory Alignment

Efforts like the impending FLAG (Forest, Land and Agriculture) guidance are coalescing into a more normalized and structured ecosystem, while regulations like EPR are bringing packaging into the spotlight.

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Navigating the Political Climate: Destination Remains the Same 

Conversation on the current political and regulatory landscape highlighted the challenges of the current climate, including discrepancies between US and EU sentiments, but ultimately pointed to corporate commitment holding firm.

No Backing Down

Despite the political challenges and pushback, companies are, by and large, not backing down from their core climate commitments.

Change the Course, Keep the Destination

‍Peter Bakker, CEO of WBCSD, has said that we must change the course, but keep the destination the same. The current environment is forcing the sustainability community to strengthen its arguments, focusing more tightly on ROI, resilience, revenue growth, and bottom-line efficiency. But the end goal remains the same.

Integrating Business and Government

While integration between corporate investments and local/international governance is still needed, work is actively underway. This includes hints at bringing bottom-up accounting data to the realm of international trade, trade agreements, tariffs  and working with city governments to create unified solutions.

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Looking Ahead: Signals for 2026

HowGood’s leadership team is seeing the food industry's path forward defined by a shift from ambition to execution at scale, driven by the essential transparency of stable technology to manage resilience and risk as the new language for unlocking capital and delivering climate solutions.

• Alexander Gillett: Transparency is essential to drive dollars into the right places for climate solutions.
• Arthur Gillett: Scale the work because it’s no longer about convincing people it’s needed, it’s about execution.
• Nina Mayer: The technology is here and stable, so let’s get creative about what it can solve for.
• Ethan Soloviev: Resilience and risk will be the language that unlocks the next round of capital.