Our thinking

Putting the action in London Climate Action Week

27 June, 2025

If Glastonbury was the only big festival in your June calendar, you might have just missed a big one. Billed as ‘the largest city-wide climate festival in Europe’, London Climate Action Week (LCAW) has seen the city play host this week to a vibrant mix of high-level policy discussion, corporate conversations, grassroots innovation, and everything in between.  

This year, LCAW feels even more significant given a shift in the global landscape. Historically, New York Climate Week in September has been a key moment in the climate calendar – but that platform is becoming less assured amid shifting political tides in the US. LCAW, by contrast, has emerged as a confident counterweight: open, accessible, and increasingly impactful. 

We’ve been out and about soaking it all in, from panel discussions on climate finance to round tables on supply chain decarbonisation. A few particularly exciting announcements that caught our eye are: 

– The UK Government announced a consultation on climate-related transition plans, as part of its efforts to “make the UK the sustainable finance capital of the world”  

– A new SME sustainability data standard is live, thanks to B4NZ. It aims to make emissions reporting more consistent, credible, and manageable for small businesses – a notoriously tricky area to crack.  

–  Carbon Commons was launched, a project to develop an open-source dataset of emissions factors to improve the comparability of supply chain carbon accounting

 There’s always a risk that climate weeks become more about the stage than the substance. But LCAW 2025 has shown real progress, with practical tools and clear-eyed calls to action. In a world that doesn’t need more hot air, this week delivered some much-needed fresh thinking. 

By Louise Podmore