Climate Week NYC Draws Out Sustainable Brands and World-Class Greenwashers

Climate Week NYC, an event hosted by the nonprofit business group Climate Group, descends on New York this week to coincide with the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

While world leaders engage in diplomacy on East 45th Street—while facing tens of thousands of protesters fighting for an end to fossil fuels—Climate Week focuses primarily on the private sector.

Together, these gatherings mean that there are tens of thousands of climate people in New York right now, and brands are taking note. On the one hand, sustainably minded brands have a captive, like-minded audience—and on the other hand, it can be a ripe opportunity for greenwashing.

“The way for corporations to participate in a helpful way would be to actually act according to their commitments and then talk about those actions,” Amy Westervelt, investigative climate journalist and host of the Drilled podcast, told Adweek. “It’s not that hard.”

Tour company Intrepid Travel is using a combination of out-of-home, digital and experiential advertising to grab the attention of these environmentally-focused visitors and locals, all flocking to Manhattan for a slew of closed-door meetings, public talks, casual meetups, happy hours or protests. At the same time, sponsors like construction company Saint-Gobain and consulting firm McKinsey are drawing criticism for their participation, which activists see as antithetical to the goals of Climate Week.

‘Good Trips Only’

Intrepid, which organizes sustainably designed small group travel across the globe, chose this time and place to kick off its biggest ad campaign in North America to date.

A roughly $1 million investment, this iteration of the ongoing “Good Trips Only” campaign is posting up in subway cars, wrapping pedicabs and Citibikes—which support sustainable transit methods—and sponsoring hand-painted murals in Brooklyn.

“The only way to truly feel good when you travel is by doing it mindfully and purposefully and sustainably,” said Mikey Sadowski, vp of global communications at Intrepid. “We really want to be positioned as that turnkey way to see the world a little more responsibly.”

In addition to the OOH media, Intrepid has a narrative ad placement in The New York Times and audio ads on The Daily podcast. It’ll also take over experiential marketing space Showfields Brooklyn to host an activation featuring a newsstand with Intrepid’s Good Times publication, video footage from a selection of the company’s trips and panel discussions in partnership with Travel Massive, B Local NYC and Atlas Obscura.

The campaign comes as people question the crowd-sourced and crowded form of travel that top 10 lists and travel influencers have created—and the carbon emissions associated with it. According to a recent poll from Intrepid Travel and Harris Interactive, half of travelers said they’d be willing to change their travel plans to reduce their carbon footprint, even if it’s more costly or inconvenient.

Beware the greenwash

This all happens as some of Climate Week’s corporate sponsors come under fire from environmental watchdog groups.

The lead sponsor of the event is Saint-Gobain, a plastics manufacturer behind a disastrous leak of “forever chemicals” into the water supply of several communities in New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, according to a report by the Center for Climate Integrity.

“Saint-Gobain sponsoring New York City’s Climate Week is a bit like a rat sponsoring city sanitation,” David Bond, a professor and associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College in Vermont, told Emily Sanders, author of the Center for Climate Integrity’s ExxonKnews newsletter. Saint-Gobain had not responded to comment by press time.

While there’s lots of greenwashing at Climate Week, that’s not surprising, said Solitaire Townsend, co-founder of climate-focused agency Futerra.

“Every single platform around climate is always in danger of attracting major greenwashers, because, of course, they deliberately try to get in,” Townsend said.

Still, the value of Climate Week is in what happens behind the scenes, she explained, in closed-door meetings. “The real work of Climate Week is not the grandstand moment.”