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Closing Out kyu House at Climate Week

What happened on kyu House Day 3.

A woman with short curly hair and glasses speaks into a microphone during a panel discussion, while two other panelists, a woman and a man, listen attentively beside her.
All photos by David Dini for kyu House

Published

Topic

Sustainability, Collaboration

Companies

SYPartners, Gehl

Featuring

Jessica Orkin, Blaine Merker, Tim Brown

All week kyu House brimmed with ideas about the kinds of leadership and solutions needed to meet the urgency of the climate crisis. On its final day at Climate Week New York, kyu House sessions and workshops coalesced around the future of climate action, and what it could look like when we get things right.

Three people sit on red chairs during a panel discussion. The person in the center speaks, gesturing with their hands, while the other two listen. Papers, cups, and a laptop are on the table in front of them.
The panel included leaders like Natura &Co’s Alexandre da Rocha Leão and Kite Insight’s Sophie Lambin.

SESSION RECAP

Shaping Organizations of the Future Through Next-Generation Leaders

The sentiment around this Climate Week was that people were, at last, talking about the unseen parts of the iceberg — and taking action towards the underlying systems that need to change. SYPartners​’s session began with a provocation from its CEO, Jessica Orkin: ​“How can we unleash collective potential across generations to an intimate and diverse group of leaders?”

Alexandre da Rocha Leão, sustainability and impact valuation lead at Natura &Co, is an engineer by training. Next-generation leadership to him is addressing the climate crisis as a crisis of perspective. ​“We need to regain understanding the point of view of the other,” he said, ​“and of the planet itself.”

Sage Lenier, Founder of Sustainable & Just Future, noted that while the economy may have grown five times in the past 50 years, it’s been accompanied by a 98% degradation of the world’s ecosystems: ​“We take resources from Earth, we turn them into things, we ship them all around the world, we landfill them and then we start that process all over again.” Next-generation leadership must think beyond this. ​“What we really need is a vision for what it looks like to have the resources that we’ve already extracted stay circulating,” said Lenier.

A woman with brown hair sits on a red chair, holding a microphone and smiling while speaking. She is wearing a tan outfit with a sweater draped over her shoulders. Tall plants and a small table are visible in the background.
A woman with curly hair, dressed in a dark suit, sits on a red chair holding a microphone and speaking during an indoor event. A screen and a glass of water are visible in the background.
From left: SYP’s Jessica Orkin and Sustainable & Just Future founder Sage Lenier.

Around-the-room introductions showcased a wealth of experience, from consumer goods to venture capital. Sophie Lambin, CEO and founder of Kite Insights, facilitated a discussion of what next-generation leadership looks like. Here’s some of what was said:

  • As we think about what next-generation leadership looks like conceptually and philosophically, we need to build skills that allow us to hear across generations, geographies, continents and histories.
  • Senior leadership has a responsibility to listen to cross sections of the company and make decisions with a diversity of voices in mind.
  • If the current economic frameworks built on the exploitation of the Global South are failing, climate action must look to the Global South for leadership.
A man stands and speaks into a microphone while another man sits nearby on stage. They face an audience in a modern room with large screens displaying presentation slides in the background.
Gehl’s session, co-hosted with RMI, introduced a new framework for taking control of our climate destiny by reshaping our cities.

SESSION RECAP

Urban Design, Climate Destiny

In the session, ​“Urban Design, Climate Destiny,” Gehl head of climate action Blaine Merker, and Rushad Nanavatty, of Third Derivative and the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), offered a vision of the future that wasn’t just an intellectual exercise. 

“The energy transition,” Nanavatty said, ​“is not just about taking really bad widgets and replacing them with better widgets.” Rather, cities are the form factor of the transition. Research shows that some of the most effective climate action decisions made by local governments include constructing the right kinds of buildings in low-emission locations. 

A man in a green blazer holds a microphone and papers while speaking, standing indoors with colorful blurred posters in the background.
A man in a navy shirt holds a microphone and papers while sitting on a red chair, speaking to an audience. Blurred people are in the foreground, and tall plants are visible in the background.
From left: Third Derivative and RMI’s Rushad Nanavatty and Gehl’s Blaine Merker introduced the session.

“Look out for how the city is built at the eye-level. Think about human behavior,” said Merker. ​“Is it landing for people in a way that helps them live their lives?” Tempe, Arizona; Shanghai, China; and Carmel, Indiana are examples of how pivoting investment away from dispersion is an investment in human connection.

A panel hosted by RMI senior associate Yuki Numata, included Majora Carter, CEO of the Majora Carter Group, who asked us to consider who benefits from good design. ​“The real elephant in the room,” she noted, ​“is that lower-status communities in those cities are often not even given a second thought.”

Felipe Ramírez Buitrago, urban mobility director at the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities led Bogotá, Colombia through a tremendous change as its Secretary of Mobility. He thinks the transformation of infrastructure is an opportunity to address other social issues; electrification of the Bogotá bus system created a 100% woman-driven public operator system.

Robin Chase asked that we consider what we’ve given up to our cars: our freedom of movement and free movement.

A smiling woman in a maroon blazer sits on a red chair holding a microphone, engaged in conversation. A glass of water is on a small table nearby; blurred greenery and a screen are in the background.
A smiling woman with glasses and curly hair sits on a red chair, holding a microphone and gesturing with her hand while speaking. An open book rests on her lap, and a glass of water is on the table beside her.
From left: RMI’s Yuki Numata hosted a panel that included speakers like CEO Majora Carter.

SESSION RECAP

Is Climate Action Job Creation?

The evening continued with a vigorous debate presented by LinkedIn as to whether climate action is job creation.

On the For side, Kwolanne Felix of Black Girl Environmentalist pondered what to her was the essential question, ​“Will humanity move or will we be moved?” Caterina Sarfatti, managing director of Inclusion and Global Leadership at C40 Cities, made the case that since the fossil fuel economy is no longer the driver of human progress, climate represents a huge opportunity.

There are 24 million jobs that will be created in the energy transition, 9 million new in the U.S. alone. Switchboard founder Patrick Flynn posited that when everyone brings their unique skills to creating a new sustainable economy, every job will be a climate job: ​“We will see that climate action is job creation.”

But the Against side presented an original argument that ultimately won the crowd.

Frontier Markets Founder & CEO Ajaita Shah made the case that conversations center around job creation in the West, leaving out the 7 billion people in the Global South who need the opportunity to be seen and heard differently. ​“We do that through entrepreneurship. We do that through livelihoods,” said Shah. ​“We do that through a very different lens of looking at where the masses who, frankly speaking, are at the center of climate justice, they’re at the center of the changes.”

“Talking about job creation can actually be a red herring,” argued Elemental Excelerator CEO Dawn Lippert. It distracts us from the idea that ownership is at the heart of the true transformation and change necessary for climate action.

Similarly, David Carlin of D. A. Carlin and Company implored the audience to think about ecosystems theory: ​“We can’t solve climate without nature. That’s why we can’t solve the challenges of biodiversity loss without considering pollution; that’s why we can’t solve climate action without thinking about underlying inequalities and without thinking about the system that got us here,” he said.

While the argument presented by the Against side was more persuasive, everyone agreed it wasn’t a zero-sum game. Entrepreneurship is a vital part of job creation. In a way, everyone won this deeply thoughtful debate.

A woman with long brown hair, wearing a black jacket and earrings, speaks into a microphone while gesturing with her hand. A blurred background with purple lighting is visible behind her.
A man with short dark hair, a beard, and glasses speaks into a microphone while wearing a suit jacket and a white shirt. He gestures with one hand and stands in front of a blurred, brightly lit background.
From left: Climate activist Luisa-Marie Neubauer, LinkedIn’s Efrem Bycer, and guests enjoying the evening reception. 

SESSION RECAP

The Ultimate Investment Story

kyu House at Climate Week NYC concluded with a compelling vision of the future through ​“The Ultimate Investment Story,” hosted by ALN Kenya partner Wangui Kaniaru and centering on African entrepreneurship.

Ciirũ Wawerũ Waithaka, CEO of Anjiru, is a designer by training. With her decades of entrepreneurship she sees a significant mindset shift holding back sustainable development.

“How do we bridge the tyranny of low expectation?” she asked. Banning the word ​“potential” and thinking about the ​“promise” is a piece of the puzzle, as is bringing in partnerships with specific expertise.

“We are not just creating jobs, but also need to create wealth,” said Maryanne Ochola, managing director of Endeavor Kenya. She asked the venture capital ecosystem to do more, citing research that in 2023 Africa received just 1% of venture capital worldwide. ​“That tells me you don’t believe that Africa is a scale-up continent,” she said. ​“The challenge that I want to pose to all of us today is to see entrepreneurs all the way through: They’re not just a ​‘feel good’ story, they’re a scale-up story.”

Two people sit on red chairs during a discussion. The person on the left smiles and holds a microphone and notes, wearing glasses, a textured jacket, and purple shoes. The person on the right sits beside them, also smiling.
A man speaks into a microphone during a panel discussion, seated on a red chair, while two other people listen attentively in the foreground.
Tim Brown and Masanobu Iwabuchi from ENND PARTNERS hosted a session on Japanese business lessons.
Highlights From Wednesday
  • ENND PARTNERS leaders Tim Brown and Masanobu Iwabuchi were joined by Marukome’s Shuta Aoki to explore Japanese business lessons — and how they can help in today’s climate fight. They talked about existing in the space between the past and future, the concept of mottainai (a sense of regret concerning waste), and how to balance long and short-term thinking. The session finished with a tasting of the Marukome Aosa seaweed miso soup referenced in the engaging session.
  • What happens when we bring more nature and biodiversity into our everyday lives? Gehl​’s second kyu House session explored how we can increase productivity, creativity, and well-being by transforming urban spaces. Gehl CIO Jeff Risom chatted with experts doing just that: urban ecologist Robin Grossinger, who talked about translating native habitats into an urban context at Google’s new St John’s Terminal building, Creative Denmark’s Majken Kalhave, Kristen Rydberg (of the urban beekeeping company Alvéole), and Blaine Merker, who expanded on Gehl’s shift to thinking about cities for people and planet.
Five people sit on stools in a panel discussion. One man on the left speaks while holding a microphone. The others listen and smile, with a backdrop of natural decorations behind them and a screen partially visible to the right.
Gehl’s panel talked about working with nature.

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