London Climate Action Week returned this year against an intense backdrop: temperatures pushed close to 40°C, causing widespread disruption across the city. Inside events, the shift was just as sharp. This wasn’t a week of pledges. Instead, the focus was on execution.
Our team hosted, moderated and attended sessions across London, and one common thread ran through nearly all of them: the next phase of corporate climate action will be judged on delivery, not intent. Targets are largely set. The test now is whether organisations can execute against them, credibly, under scrutiny, and without the room to simply start again.
That framing set the tone for our flagship day at IET Savoy Place.
The day opened with the argument that will likely define this decade of corporate climate leadership. In a fireside chat with FT Sustainability Views, Schneider Electric CSO Esther Finidori unpacked what it takes to build a plan that holds up under scrutiny, the decisions that require courage, the targets that demand real change, and what the next four years will require of a company that sells energy technology while working to transform how the world uses it. This was an honest look at what it takes to move from ambition to accountability.
Our Executive Forum, opened by UKI Zone President David Hall, picked up that theme directly: climate ambition doesn’t live in strategies or pledges, it lives or dies in how real systems perform, day to day. One of the most overlooked parts of that performance is people. A panel with We Mean Business Coalition, alongside a new partnership with Vodafone on women in STEM, made the point directly: electrification at scale depends on skills as much as technology, and the pipeline into these jobs is a critical piece of delivery, not a side conversation.
Two further sessions pushed into harder territory. One asked whether AI can be net positive for the climate, given the scale of power it demands, bringing data centre operators and policymakers face to face on what efficiency-first infrastructure actually means when grid capacity is already stretched thin. The other, a fireside chat with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, discussed its very challenging task of decarbonising an estate that cannot pause nor retrofit at will, and listed buildings that cannot be taken offline. Kew’s approach, in partnership with Schneider Electric, starts with data, not ambition: understand the estate before deciding where to act.
Steve Wilhite closed the forum with a sharper provocation still: data as the bottleneck, or the engine. His argument was that the era of sustainability teams operating at the speed of manual data reconciliation is ending, and that the organisations who move fastest will be the ones who let AI take on the data work, so their people can focus on the decisions that actually move the needle.
The afternoon split into two fully booked workshops: one on renewable energy procurement with SBTi, the other on using climate finance, insetting and nature-based approaches to tackle supply chain emissions. We closed the day in partnership with the Scope 3 Peer Group, in an honest conversation with M&S and Haleon on the challenges they’ve had to overcome: gaining buy-in, engaging stakeholders, and reducing emissions at scale.
Earlier in the week, we took part in the Climate Group‘s inaugural Opportunity Summit, where we launched a new report developed with IESE Business School, The financial case for sustainability: How much value are companies leaving on the table exploring the link between sustainability performance and financial value.
We also hosted an afternoon session at our office with GRESB, on the ROI of resilience: How decarbonisation strategy, capital discipline and ESG performance measurement are starting to shape asset values and investment decisions at portfolio scale.
Beyond our own events, the team turned up across the city all week, from a World Economic Forum roundtable on climate finance, to a renewables workshop with The Climate Pledge, to a panel on the future of energy at Reset Connect.
London Climate Action Week 2026 was a lot, in every sense. The heat was its own reminder of the urgent need for action and adaptation. But the sheer volume of events and the seriousness of the conversation told a more encouraging story: organisations are past debating whether to act, and are now focused on how to deliver.
We’ll carry that into Climate Week NYC in September (register here for our event) and on to COP31 in November. The window to act is narrowing. This year, for once, the conversation kept pace.
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