Bangkok Climate Action Week wrapped up last week after convening more than 250 events across the Thai capital to “reimagine” what is already well-known to the plethora of activists, policy practitioners, and private sector representatives in attendance: Climate change is here, and Southeast Asia is in dire need of a climate-resilient future and a just energy transition.

While Bangkok Climate Week holds concerts, pop-up marketplaces, and art installations all around the city, Bangkok the city is experiencing widespread flooding from rainstorms last weekend. The preliminary death toll across Thailand has reached 31 people, according to official government numbers, while thousands have been displaced, including in more than 20 other Thai cities.

It’s painful and ironic to witness these so-called dialogues unfold amid real climate disasters. Meanwhile, these convenings have ballooned in recent years into music-festival-level attendance and programming (NYC Climate Week sees more than 100 thousand people each year), but they often include the same programming, participants, and problems, going in circles to “innovate” climate solutions.

Look, dialogues and meetings can solve some very real issues, but they need to be designed with a specific outcome in mind, and at the Pareto-efficient level of time, resources, and capacity. They are simply a direct trade-off that cannibalizes climate leaders’ time to implement climate solutions, with little to no accountability in ensuring specific change after said convenings.

Today, policymakers are encouraged — and expected — to gallivant around the world and show face at these events, at the expense of time spent on tackling issues at home. Meanwhile, corporate sponsors get to put their names on it all, effectively greenwashing their profits and claiming they’re helping fund a solution to the very problem they may well be perpetuating.

There has to be a better way, right?

Global forums can produce major breakthroughs when designed with clear outcomes in mind

Consider this: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which forms the current basis for UN-related climate negotiations, organizes several pre-summit meetings to prepare for its annual UN climate meeting, the Conference of Parties (COP). This year, UNFCCC hosted four meetings ahead of COP31 in November: the Bonn June Climate Meetings in Germany to discuss the technical framework for COP; two climate week meetings — in South Korea and Azerbaijan — to build momentum toward COP; and a pre-COP summit in Fiji.

That’s just the formal UN channels for climate negotiations. There is an entire NGO ecosystem of climate conferences that aim to offer increased grassroots and stakeholder engagement, including the NYC Climate Week (which has become known as the “Burning Man” for climate geeks), London Climate Action Week, Shanghai Climate Week, Climate Action Week Sydney, Rio Climate Action Week, and Lagos Climate Action Week. Jakarta hasn’t missed out either, with Pekan Iklim last held in 2024.

Granted, these forums can produce some major breakthroughs, such as the creation of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which has been the leading framework on climate action for the past decade, and the recently operationalized Loss and Damage Fund, a climate financing tool to compensate vulnerable countries’ climate adaptation projects and mitigate climate change-related damages.

Even informal channels can have meaningful impact, as long as they have a clear theory of change. A former project lead for an annual global convening on climate and youth for a multilateral NGO, who requested to speak on condition of anonymity, said one intangible benefit of these convenings is offering activists a platform that they otherwise would not have to travel abroad or connect with one another.

“[It] would be really cool [to see when] there was someone working on a certain type of air pollution project in one country, and then they would meet someone else from another country, and we would help facilitate those connections,” she told The Reformist.

But without clear outcome- and goal-setting, the increase in meetings poses marginal returns without implementation. There are only so many idea exchanges that can happen ahead of real policy reform and infrastructure investment.

Meanwhile, the carbon (and time) footprints are not negligible

One analysis by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University estimated that a single economy class, round-trip flight on a commercial airplane from the east coast of the United States to central Europe would produce around 1.3 metric tons of carbon dioxide per passenger, around the same carbon footprint as an average year of daily round-trip commuting (around 25 kilometers). Imagine that at a scale of 77,000 people — just how many people attended last year’s Bangkok Climate Action Week.

Beyond the direct emissions from travel and hosting these meetings, there is also an underlying question of how organizers and policymakers allocate resources and time.

Indonesian forestry expert Doddy S. Sukadri, who is a former COP summit negotiator, argued in an op-ed for Kompas that, “The large scale and grandeur of the annual COP meeting can burden the decision-making process. The logistical demands of hosting and securing service providers … can further add to the complexity and result in government hesitance to attend the climate COP summit.”

Coordinating travel and events takes time and resources (sometimes funding these organizations do not yet have, forcing them to seek external grants to keep up) that could otherwise go to other programming.

“[Our NGO] ran a grants program,” the former project lead explained, “where we would give out up to [USD]10,000 for young people to do climate projects. When you look at the budget, it’s kind of funny to think [how a certain] amount of dollars are going to these travel expenses … is enough money for more climate projects that instead didn’t get funded because [of the] way the budget was allocated.”

Climate-conscious NGOs and nonprofit leaders should consider whether attending or facilitating these meetings are meaningfully contributing to climate action, or whether they are simply hosting and participating in a convening for the sake of it.

For these convenings to be worth the time, energy, and resources, various climate leaders, funders, and governments in the ecosystem need to exercise their agency and honestly ask themselves:

Policy leaders are exhausted, too

It is an (almost) universally acknowledged truth that high-level government officials in the Ministry of Environment — among others — end up spending a significant amount of time in meetings and dialogues with domestic and international development partners. These obligations can leave them with less time to do the actual work, yet they have little choice but to fulfill them.

A dedicated directorate just for international stakeholder engagement, with staff whose full-time job is to attend these meetings, almost starts to sound like a sensible idea. Alas, resources are scarce in Global South governments. Officials often have to attend these meetings to secure more resources, even as the meetings consume their most precious resource: time.

“It seems that the UNFCCC Secretariat is trapped in the notion that world leaders must always be present at the COP,” wrote Sukadri in his Kompas op-ed. In reality, Sukadri added, “what is truly needed is not their presence… but rather actions and tangible examples in providing climate leadership.” That is to say, while global negotiations can align countries and build trust on major pillars of financing and energy transition, the so-called work of climate leadership itself is on regional, national, and local platforms.

So, if the organizers are stretched thin planning these events that policymakers are too preoccupied with attending instead of implementing meaningful legislation, who actually benefits from these convenings?

The short answer: Corporate sponsors who get to greenwash their reputations and impose some leverage on the general themes of these convenings.

A nonprofit industrial complex focused on vibes and optics, not funding and action

The ‘corporatification’ of COP is well-documented. At COP30 in Brazil last year, fossil fuel lobbyists outnumbered country delegations by one in every twenty-five. Ahead of the COP28 summit in Dubai, former COP president and CEO of the UAE’s state oil company Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber was mired in scandal involving his attempts to arrange side deals with fossil fuel companies.

How is that even allowed?

But corporate participants’ and sponsors’ influence is especially felt at summits like Climate Week, where agendas are more dynamic and shaped by those who bid to host panels.

In New York City, tech company participants like Microsoft and Nvidia have been accused this year of greenwashing their reputations by leading sessions on climate mitigation while actively building AI data centers that use significant amounts of water and energy. In fact, according to a CNN report, this year’s summit sharply shifted from climate targets and emissions reductions to a strong focus on powering “the AI revolution and its electricity-hungry data centers without relying on newly constructed fossil fuel plants.”

“I think the overall tone, at least for New York Climate Week, is still pretty corporate,” US-based environmental and land justice activist Alexia Leclercq told The Reformist. Having attended both NYC Climate Week and various COP summits, she observed that the main problem with these meetings is that it is still “where the funders are at, and a lot of the climate space [runs] on the nonprofit industrial complex.”

The “nonprofit industrial complex” framework argues that because many NGOs are often funded by governments, foundations with establishment ties, or sometimes by private companies, they function as a form of social placating and reinforce the status quo rather than as an independent body that can demand full accountability from governments or the private sector. As a result, nonprofits can often replicate the same structural issues they criticize or are trying to reform.

What this means in practice is that it introduces a trapping cycle of nonprofits hosting events to maintain relevance and appease their fundings, while leaders and organizations participate in their events to receive funding or recognition, justifying the existence of these meetings, which continues to introduce more convenings for more funding, more networking, more clout, and so forth.

Let leaders get to work, please

Let’s be honest: The real climate work is not in the swanky hotels, expo centers, or pop-up booths in Bangkok, London, or New York; it is right here at home. Governments need to do the work. Funders need to front the money. It’s as simple as that.

This sentiment is common among organizers, according to Leclercq. “Maybe this is too idealistic of me,” she added, “but I’m like, can we just get straight to the point? Have a lunch, invite some funders, invite some nonprofits, [and organizers say] this is what we’re doing. Will you fund us?”

Nobody really wants to do this whole song and dance; not the activists, not the organizers, not the government officials. But funders — whether philanthropies, corporate donors, or Global North countries — need the willpower to want to invest in necessary climate action. They need to support adaptation and mitigation efforts by funding Global South government infrastructure, investing in frontline communities, and trusting that the leaders know their local contexts to effectively implement climate solutions that serve their people.

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