The road to climate action: Takeaways from Sustainable Future Forum NY

Speakers at the recent BNP Paribas 2024 Sustainable Future Forum (SFF) in partnership with Columbia Climate School on the sidelines of Climate Week NYC featured forward-looking discussions on climate action, including investments in the energy transition, disaster resilience and pathways to decarbonisation, such as technological advancements and practical applications in the field.  

SFF, said José Placido, CEO of BNP Paribas USA, is a forum enabling participants to discuss “how to finance and accelerate the transition to a sustainable future for all” through a collaboration between scientists, practitioners, clients, public- and private-sector leaders, and bankers while exploring “the latest research, insights and scalable solutions on the path to a low-carbon economy.”

Energy finance and investment: Where is the money going? 

Weighing in on trends in energy finance and investment was Christopher Creed, Chief Investment Officer of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which is the debt lender within the U.S. government for emerging and high-impact energy ventures. 

Creed pointed to a robust pipeline of loan requests for energy projects spanning various technologies, activities and subsectors—including battery storage, electric vehicles, chemical supply chains, offshore wind, solar and nuclear energy, natural gas, and refurbishment and reinvestment projects in existing infrastructure. 

Disaster resilience

Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) at Columbia Climate School, explained how various disasters interact with communities and man-made ecosystems—and how disaster preparedness is based on a situational understanding of exposures to potential hazards. 

Disaster scenarios are complex, he said, because they introduce a range of variables with potential relationships that could trigger cascading effects. For example, extreme weather resulting in power outages would also affect the supply of water from electric pumps. 

With disasters becoming more frequent and severe, Schlegelmilch stressed the importance of multidimensional frameworks to assess risks and manage uncertainty, and touched on the role companies can play in community resilience across three areas: 

1. Control: Infrastructure and administrative investments to confront predictable hazards, business interruption and value-chain disruption 

2. Impact: Engaging communities to reduce the damaging effect of disasters on public health and the economy  

3. Influence: Quantifying investment benefits in relation to public-health, economic and social vulnerability 

Renewable hydrogen as a decarbonisation lever

Covering renewable hydrogen’s key role in the energy transition was Ivana Jemelokova, CEO of the Hydrogen Council, a global CEO-led coalition of 140 major businesses and investors in hydrogen from more than 2o countries across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific.   

Jemelokova pointed out that there isn’t a path to “net-zero” (a state in which human-generated emissions are balanced by human-led removals of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and emission reduction) that would not include the use of hydrogen in some form.  

She provided a numeric overview and breakdown of hydrogen projects announced globally— segmented by region and phase—and cited the seven-fold growth in committed capital to the space that occurred between 2020 and 2024. According to the Hydrogen Council, North America leads in project volumes at the “front-end engineering and design” (FEED) and “final investment decision and beyond” (FID+) phases, whereas Asia-Pacific leads in infrastructure expansion and currently holds 60% of global hydrogen refuelling stations, whose deployment is led by China.  

Jemelokova concluded that if government provides workable regulation, investments in hydrogen projects will follow.  

Low-carbon investing—and the energy transition

Steve Hatfield, Co-Head of Global Sustainability at Carlyle, provided his perspective on low-carbon investing amid geopolitical uncertainty.  

As an investor, Hatfield learns about companies’ decarbonisation pathways by studying a range of matters, such as how they measure emissions of various scopes, or what emission-reduction targets they set. He noted that energy transition is not a linear effort, but rather a multidimensional challenge involving different facets. Therefore, he said, “Carlyle’s mantra is to invest—not divest, and our thesis is that we want to buy high carbon and sell low carbon while participating in the full spectrum of the energy transition.”   

Dr. Melissa Lott, former Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Climate School, said that the pace of energy-transition and decarbonisation projects is not sufficiently high to meet the climate challenge.  

She noted that current systems— such as electricity grids facing surging demand from data centres and electric-vehicle usage—aren’t set up for a rapid transition, and that there’s a need for governments to establish incentive structures that would engender trust and expedite transition efforts. “Projects move forward at the speed of trust,” Lott stressed, “and without trust—they will slow down.” 

Development finance and physical climate risk

During Climate Week, BNP Paribas also convened two breakfast meetings with senior representatives of development banks, private foundations, sustainability-project developers, the scientific community and financial institutions.  

Discussions revolved around investments with positive environmental impact, such as outcome bonds, which are seen as an innovative tool for catalysing private capital into emerging markets; the importance of data in pricing physical climate risk for insurers, re-insurers and investors; and how resilience and adaptation could be better priced by financial players—particularly to create incentives for rebuilding more resilient buildings and infrastructure. 

Explore the videos below for highlights and impressions of industry participants and BNP Paribas representatives.

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