New York Climate Week has long been known for big announcements, but this year it felt more like a working week: the focus on delivery and implementation, rather than ambition.
With more than 1,500 events across the city running alongside the UN General Assembly, the event was hailed as the biggest Climate Week yet.
Delegates arrived feeling three pressures that had been building all year: an energy price shock, a summer of climate disasters, and a fast-growing argument about the resources artificial intelligence consumes. What came out of the week was a clearer picture of where sustainability now sits in business: inside the numbers that decide whether companies grow, stall, or get stopped.
Sustainability is back, on different terms
For a few years, sustainability seemed to be slipping down the corporate agenda. Last week suggested it is returning, but not in the form it left.
Energy is the clearest example. UN Climate Chief Simon Stiell put the cost of energy shortages linked to the Iran war at more than $100 billion in higher fuel prices for American consumers alone. The UK’s Ed Miliband urged governments to treat climate and nature loss as a matter of national security. Clean power is increasingly an argument for independence and competitiveness.
Physical risk is the second. Iceland’s Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir described resilience as a foundation laid well before the storm arrives. By Thursday, the General Assembly had approved its first declaration on sea-level rise, aimed at replacing fragmented initiatives with sustained, coordinated, and properly funded action. The UN has acknowledged that overshooting 1.5°C is now inevitable. For business, the stakes are large: an MSCI analysis estimates corporate business interruption losses from climate hazards at more than $1.1 trillion a year, most of which never appears as a line on a balance sheet.
But knowing a risk exists is not the same as being able to act on it. A flood forecast only becomes a business decision when someone can put a value on what sits in its path: the asset, the revenue that depends on it, and the cost of protecting it.
That is the gap most companies face. Everyone is reporting climate risk, yet far fewer are deciding with it. That is why SAP and Jupiter Intelligence came together this week, connecting Jupiter’s physical climate risk intelligence with SAP’s enterprise data and reporting foundation. The starting point is disclosure that holds up to scrutiny. The direction of travel is climate risk that informs where companies invest, protect, and build.
The real question about AI is permission
At SAP, we deliver ethical AI through human-centered innovation that augments human capabilities
If one subject dominated the week, it was AI. Views were sharply divided: Stiell warned that AI leaders are “on thin ice” when it comes to their license to operate, while speakers from all across business and academia argued that AI is too important to give up and will ultimately help tackle climate change.
Both sides are responding to something real. But the issue that will decide AI’s path is not capability, which is already abundant, but whether the people who host AI, power it, and work alongside it keep agreeing to it. Every model runs on land, electricity, water, and cooling. Every data center needs a community willing to have it, and every rollout needs a workforce willing to adopt it. Groups weighing a new data center don’t separate the water question from the jobs question, and companies can’t afford to either.
Governments are starting to set expectations. Türkiye’s COP31 presidency launched the Antalya Pledge on AI, with the COP31 President-Designate saying companies are expected to be transparent about their energy use and to power their operations with clean energy. A draft is due before the summit, which will have a dedicated day on technology and AI.
That pressure applies to every company’s climate commitments, SAP’s included. We have run our own offices and data centers on 100% renewable electricity since 2014, we consider environmental impact at the design stage of our AI architecture, and we have started sharing the footprint of our cloud services with customers, with a beta view for selected products now in SAP for Me. While none of that makes the challenge go away, it makes it visible, and measuring a footprint is where accountability starts.
The week also showed the other side of the ledger. Working from connected data, AI can weigh cost, carbon, availability, and regulation in a single decision, which no planning team can do by hand at scale. Instead of checking whether every product is compliant, companies can ask which products are at risk, why, and what design or supplier change would fix it.
“The question for sustainability leaders is no longer how to manage AI’s impact. It’s how to shape where AI investment goes,” said Sophia Mendelsohn, chief sustainability and commercial officer at SAP. “AI can weigh cost, carbon, and risk together, but only if sustainability is in the data it works from. Leave it out, and AI will optimize it away.”
Governance is the other half of the answer. Speed won the first phase of AI adoption. The next phase will go to organizations that can show how an automated decision was reached and who is accountable for it. In 2025, SAP reviewed 860 AI use cases against its AI ethics principles and escalated 44% as high-risk for senior review. Where no ethically acceptable trade-off could be found, the project did not go ahead in its original form.
Implementation runs on systems
The organizers asked delegates to move from ambition to implementation. The main obstacle to that remains disconnected data. When sustainability information sits apart from procurement, manufacturing, and finance, even good AI produces confident wrong answers: recommending a lower-carbon supplier, for instance, that is not approved for the market in question. The organizations making progress treat sustainability data with the same discipline as financial data, with the same quality standards, audit trail, and controls.
Industrial manufacturer HARTING, for example, connected its sustainability data to the systems it already runs, moving product carbon footprint calculations from manual work to AI-assisted mapping across its material portfolio.
Nowhere does that discipline matter more than in the supply chain.
“Every climate target eventually becomes a supply chain decision: what you source, where you make it, how you move it,” Mendelsohn said. “That’s where commitments are won or lost, and that’s where the data has to be.”
The road to Antalya
New York Climate Week was the last major business gathering before COP31 in Antalya in November, and the COP31 presidency used the week to launch a global pledge to raise electricity’s share of final energy consumption to 35% by 2035, and a new pledge on how AI is powered and measured.
Pledges set the direction, but the pace is set by business decisions. Away from the main stages, the conversations with customers last week sounded different from a few years ago. The questions focused on what carbon costs, where supply chains are exposed, and whether the numbers will hold up to an auditor. Those are commercial questions, and they have commercial answers. The tools, the economics, and the business case are largely in place. What remains is connecting them inside the processes where decisions are actually made.
That is truest of all for AI, the technology that dominated last week. It will scale only as far as the energy, data, and trust beneath it allow. In other words, AI’s future runs through sustainability, and the companies that act on that now will set the pace for everyone else.
To learn more about how SAP can support, visit SAP Sustainability.
Monica Molesag, Head of Sustainability Communications
Subscribe to the SAP News Center for the latest SAP news each week
