Events

Build Clean Now
Climate Week NYC 2026
Highlights

During the UN General Assembly and Climate Week NYC, the Industrial Transition Accelerator (ITA), Mission Possible Partnership (MPP) and partners, hosted a flagship global event: the inaugural Industry Acceleration Summit.

On 21 September we gathered more than 160 leaders, together identifying best practices and sharing lessons to replicate success and accelerate the flow of investment into clean industry.

Simon Stiell, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary

Climate Week NYC

Mary Schapiro, Vice Chair, GFANZ

“Your efforts are moving clean industry closer to reality, at scale” said Simon Stiell, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary and ITA Co-Chair, in his opening keynote.

Speakers and participants at the summit explored how to speed up the transition. “The more you build, the cheaper it gets. The cheaper it gets, the more you deploy,” said Jennifer Holmgren of LanzaTech. Mary Schapiro, Vice Chair of GFANZ, told summit attendees: “the bottleneck is not ambition. It is turning a low-carbon pathway into a project with a site, an offtaker and a permit at a faster pace than we’ve achieved to date.”

Six deep-dive sessions gave participants the opportunity to discuss in detail the six acceleration levers:

Markets: reliable demand for clean commodities
Energy: securing access to plentiful, cheap and clean power
Supply Chains: structuring new equipment and feedstock supply chains
Communities: delivering benefits to the places that host projects to foster political durability
Trade: enabling clean trade flows for lower-cost global value chains
Finance: public money taking on the risk so private capital will follow

Tim McDonnell Semafor host

Break out conversations

Panel discussion LanzaTech and Stegra

Panel discussion EIB and World Bank

Deep dive session

Delegates shared bright spots and case studies: what’s working and how others could replicate that success.

Our film: India’s clean industrial moment, shown in the opening plenary, told the story of India’s rapid progress through interviews with leaders of AM Green, ACME Clean Tech and the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI).

China Hongqiao, one of the world’s biggest aluminium producers, explained how they moved from relying solely on coal to nearly 40% renewable electricity in five years.

David Blood of Generation Investment Management said he was encouraged on the direction of travel: “political momentum is not the same as economic momentum,” and called for corporate and finance voices to push capital to the Global South: “I suspect that in 12 months’ time when we reconvene, there will be significant change, significant progress.”

Insights from the summit will inform an Industry Acceleration Brief, to be published ahead of COP31. Sign up for our newsletter to keep informed.

Very many thanks to our event partners:

AFID, Asia Society Policy Institute, Blueprint Initiative, Brunswick Group, C40 Cities, Climate Club, CIF, E3G, Energy Transitions Commission, GFANZ, IRENA, We Mean Business Coalition, WBCSD and World Resources Institute, with Boston Consulting Group, Constructive and Semafor.