For those who live and work in New York City, the start of fall is not only characterized by the changing of leaves or aroma of pumpkin spice, but also the road closures and traffic delays that accompany the UN General Assembly and coinciding Climate Week.

Against the backdrop of the IPO of Klaviyo on the New York Stock Exchange, signaling the increasing energy returning to the IPO market, we hosted a number of events last week at the NYSE, where the intersection of climate and capital is embodied and celebrated. To kick-off NYC Climate Week, the NYSE hosted the launch of the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) Natural Capital Standards on Monday.

TNFD Co-Chairs David Craig and Elizabeth Maruma Mrema addressed the audience, sharing their excitement of the launch and bringing some bees and plants on the trading floor “to bring nature into the financial markets.”

The NYSE proudly hosted this milestone event as an organization that understands the importance of transparency to financial markets and the global economy, as well as the key role of standardization in delivering the transparency on which our markets rely.

Our community of NYSE listed companies and ICE’s data and exchange clients have a growing appreciation of the importance of natural capital and the need to understand and measure the risks to which assets are exposed. The launch of the TNFD framework is a valuable partner to companies as they measure and disclose the risks associated with nature’s critical enabling role in their businesses.

On Wednesday, ICE hosted its annual Climate and Capital Conference to bring together industry leaders across the investment, business and climate communities to discuss emerging climate-related challenges and opportunities. With the positive response of last year’s event and the many connections and conversations it generated, we decided to make this an annual meeting and welcomed Accenture this year as a co-host and sponsor.

To open the conference, David Craig’s keynote remarks shared with the audience that “[t]he financial industry is starting to realize the magnitude of nature and climate risks. Nature risk is quite larger than what many companies thought.”

The event was structured around three interconnected themes: adaptation, innovation, and regulation.

Adaptation is an important element to our success living in a world where we’ve greatly impacted the natural environment. Innovation is a key component of how we're going to solve the climate problem. And regulation continues to be an important issue to shareholders, stakeholders, and customers of companies that are driving disclosure and commitments to reducing emissions and net zero goals.

During the conference, I had the privilege of talking to Kamran Khan, Managing Director and Head of ESG in Asia Pacific at Deutsche Bank, in a fireside chat to discuss how to measure impact with the right data. “Investors can only make smart decisions with effective, useful, and timely data. In the ESG world, it’s important to think about private versus publicly available data, which is being created as we speak and different metrics being presented by TCFD, TNFD, ISSB, among others,” Khan shared.

“When thinking about making smart business decisions that are also impactful, players like ICE who can combine financial data with well-monitored non-financial data into the same package are very well placed,” he added.

We were also pleased to welcome Jeffrey Ubben, Founder and Managing Partner of Inclusive Capital Partners, to open the Innovation portion of the day, and also appeared on a recent episode of Inside the ICE House.

According to Ubben, “The urgency of this situation around atmospheric CO2 is how do we decarbonize now and how do we do it at scale.” He added, “The best way to do it now is to work with carbon emitters themselves, who are often left out of the conversation or run away from by the ESG community.”

To round out the week, the NYSE hosted the UN Sustainable Development Goals Investment Forum on Thursday, where the conversation centered around investment in critical areas of sustainable development. As demand for impact investing continues to grow, the UN SDGs remain as one key framework of measuring impact for investors.

We at ICE look forward to continuing the conversation around climate and capital at COP28 in UAE later this year.