The Nature Hub CWNYC 2025 events

Invitation Only  – The Doris Duke Foundation and the forest-climate community will spotlight the outcomes from the recent 9^th American Forest Congress and the critical role of U.S. forests in addressing our most pressing challenges.

U.S. forests face many threats today: both ecological and political. But the potential of forests to help address important societal needs–from climate action and employment to health and housing–unlocks new opportunities for progress.

This reception will bring together leaders, innovators, and allies and feature speakers from American Forests, Climate Advisers, the Doris Duke Foundation, and other leading organizations creating a new era of climate-resilient forests.

Amazonia Viva is an award-winning 10-minute virtual reality film that transports viewers to the Tapajós River region of the Brazilian Amazon. The 360° immersive experience unveils one of the most important ecosystems on the planet, bringing the Amazon closer to the people. Raquel Tupinambá, a cacique indigenous leader from the Surucuá community, welcomes the viewer into her homeland and guides them through a fully interactive virtual journey. Along the way, the majesty of the world’s largest rainforest is revealed, as are the imminent threats it faces. The film was produced by the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative Brazil, a partnership working to bring moral urgency and faith-based leadership to efforts to protect the Brazilian Amazon and defend the rights of indigenous peoples and traditional communities. Amazonia Viva is being showcased at major museums in Brazil and at global events around the world, and can be experienced by all Nature Hub participants in the first floor networking lounge.

Over the past decade, the structure of investments in nature-based solutions has matured—unlocking meaningful financial flows and a compelling business case.

We will explore lessons learned from past investment successes (and challenges) and how to build on that experience to accelerate NBS investment going forward. The panel will address key questions for decision-makers:  How can the business case be effectively built and communicated within an organization?  Which investment structures and project types offer the most attractive risk-return profiles?  How is the business case evolving?

This event will delve into these critical issues, offering insights to help investors navigate the evolving landscape of nature-based solutions.

As momentum builds around nature-based solutions and forest restoration ahead of COP30, this event will spotlight what it truly takes to mobilize private capital and deliver large-scale restoration on the ground. Focusing on tangible progress in Brazil and Latin America, panelists will explore the project design, financing, collaboration, community engagement and technical expertise needed to restore vast areas of degraded land. The discussion will move beyond ambition to highlight real-world implementation at scale, with a particular focus on multi-sector initiatives such as the Brazil Restoration and Bioeconomy Finance Coalition.

Framed around the question “What does it take to restore tens of thousands of hectares of forest?”, this event will showcase concrete examples from panelists leading large scale restoration projects in Brazil. The discussion will highlight progress to date from a range of leading initiatives and strategies, including investments made, hectares under restoration, biodiversity co-benefits, and lessons learned.

As the world looks toward COP30 in Belém, Brazil, Climate Week NYC presents a timely platform to spotlight how private capital can be mobilized in service of climate justice, biodiversity protection, and Indigenous leadership.

This high-level panel will spotlight the Equitable Earth Standard—a new benchmark for high-integrity, community-centered forest conservation—and the Outcome Bond initiative, an innovative financing mechanism that aligns climate ambition with equity and impact at scale.

This event will mark the official opening of the Nature Hub at Climate Week NYC.

Eighteen organisations have united to spotlight cross-sector action to Lead, Invest, Adapt, and Grow — with Nature during two days of vibrant programming in the heart of New York City. There are 29 organisations in the Nature4Climate coalition, also engaging in various ways throughout the programme.

We know that governments can no longer develop policies and manage public finance without considering nature in their plans. The private sector cannot operate without acknowledging the need to halt and reverse nature loss, securing a net-zero, nature-positive economy. Profitable investments must recognize the opportunities that preserving and restoring the natural world can bring.

The Nature Hub in New York hopes to bring together leaders from all walks of life to make a united commitment to embed nature within climate action.

The event will be an invite-only reception, kicking off with short remarks from the speakers before opening up the floor for networking with refreshments. It will be an opportunity for attendees to meet diverse leaders from the front line of nature-based solutions – and to get a sneak preview of the venue and exciting programming that will be taking place during these first two days of Climate Week NYC.

As Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom push forward with major infrastructure projects in mining, forestry, agriculture, and housing, there’s a critical question: are we fully recognizing the economic potential of our natural assets? From healthy soils to green infrastructure, nature provides essential foundations for long-term prosperity.

This session, presented by the RBC Climate Action Institute and Nature United, showcases a portfolio of case studies from natural resource sectors where investing in nature delivers measurable returns for people, the economy, and the environment. These examples demonstrate the growing “nature economy” — where restoring and protecting natural assets directly supports economic growth.

The Nature Hub final debate will explore these case studies and discover how businesses and communities are achieving nature-positive outcomes in an era of reindustrialization across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

The U.S. forest sector is at a turning point. As climate impacts intensify and federal leadership reconfigures, new tools such as AI, satellite data, and digital traceability offer a path forward. But for these technologies to deliver real impact, they must serve a broader tree-based economy: landowners, industries, communities, and climate actors alike. This session explores how digital measurement, reporting, and verification (dMRV) can evolve from informing narrow offset protocols into a public-facing infrastructure of trust, transparency, and climate effectiveness starting at the scale of an individual tree. The session convenes forest leaders, data innovators, and designers to ask: What would it take to build a digital backbone for forest climate action that works for all? And how can we use data not just to monitor carbon, but to unlock a resilient tree-based economy? Hosted by CTrees, a science-technology NGO accelerating tree- based dMRV, this session builds bridges between real-world needs and research frontiers.

In this session, CI and leading private and public sector partners will explore how bioeconomy and conservation finance can drive lasting benefits for people and nature. Discover how bioeconomy initiatives supporting pro-nature enterprises create economic opportunities through ecosystem restoration, sustainable production and harvesting—offering a new community partnership model for achieving durable impacts in the most important areas for biodiversity and climate.

For thousands of years, Tribes and Native communities have led the way in stewarding healthy lands and waters through Traditional Knowledge (TK)—adapting to shifting climates with ingenuity, resilience, and care. Today, this leadership is more critical than ever. As climate change accelerates, Native communities face increasing threats from wildfire, drought, flooding, and ecosystem disruption—often without the resources or land access needed to respond.

This session will spotlight the Advancing Tribal Nature-Based Solutions project, launched by First Nations Development Institute to amplify Native-led climate action rooted in TK and place-based stewardship. Attendees will learn about the growing demand for tribal nature-based solutions: a recent national grant opportunity garnered 67 proposals totaling $12.6 million in funding requests—underscoring the urgent, unmet need across Indian Country.

Through compelling presentations and dialogue, the Stewarding Native Lands team will introduce a new Social Impact Fund designed to catalyze investment in tribal disaster preparedness, ecosystem restoration, and climate adaptation. This fund aims to scale the proven solutions Native communities are already advancing—solutions that not only restore biodiversity and protect ancestral lands, but also support traditional lifeways and self-determined futures.

This is an invitation to local leaders, practitioners, and donors alike: come learn, listen, and engage in meaningful partnerships that honor the deep interdependence between Native knowledge, healthy ecosystems, and climate resilience. Investing in tribal nature-based solutions is not just a moral imperative—it’s a strategic path toward a more just, sustainable, and biodiverse future.

As the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss escalate, forest managers and the communities that rely on them—face growing pressure to deliver scalable, credible in-forest management solutions that reduce risks and leverage forets as climate solutions. Forests are among our most powerful natural allies in the fight against climate change, but unlocking their full potential requires widespread conservation, restoration, and sustainable management. That’s where in-forest best practice informed by vulnerability and risk tools, come in.

This session dives into how certification standards offer a trusted framework for climate and nature strategies—linking the forest floor to value chains. With climate impacts accelerating, upgrading forest management standards that support adaptation and mitigation outcomes is no longer optional—it’s essential.

Key Questions We’ll Explore:
Defining Best Practice: What does an effective climate response look like in forest management?
Building Adaptive Capacity: How can vulnerability and risk tools help companies and communities better prepare and respond to a changing climate?
Managing Impacts: What strategies and operational responses can forest managers use to address threats like wildfires?
Long-Term Resilience: What practices must be deployed now to ensure forests remain healthy and resilient in the future, while continuing to store and sequester carbon?
Charting the Roadmap: Who are the trailblazers? Who needs to be involved to drive systemic change?

This dialogue offers practical solutions and real-world insights on a vision of a nature-positive future. Together, we’ll explore how conservation, restoration and management can respond to climate impacts—and forests can be leveraged as climate solutions.

Millions of people live in communities at high risk of flood, fire, drought, and other climate-related extreme events that affect their health and well-being. People and nature are reliant on each other, and adaptation and resilience efforts should reflect this relationship. Nature supports communities, economies, and infrastructure in facing climate change while people play a vital role in restoring, managing, and protecting nature.

Through meaningful partner engagement and scientific modeling and mapping, we have the ability to prioritize areas most at risk—and most crucial for building resilience. We can then work with a diverse set of constituents to mitigate these risks through a set of holistic solutions that integrate the value of nature and prioritize the restoration and conservation of high-value ecosystems, like wetlands, forests, and coastal systems, to help communities survive shocks and thrive over time.
This session will highlight how holistic decision-making that incorporates nature can serve as a foundation for effective and resilient landscape planning, funding, and policy. We’ll explore how forest restoration, integrated watershed management, and resilient livelihood strategies can combine with climate-smart infrastructure planning to manage trade-offs and increase positive outcomes. We’ll also examine the benefits of working across sectors to enhance resilience for people, businesses, and nature.

We will bring examples that leverage scientific rigor, innovative technologies, corporate leadership, and financial mechanisms to demonstrate how nature-based solutions and collaboration can combine to deliver real progress in building resilience for people and nature. Panelists will share their stories about what’s needed to implement nature-based solutions crucial for building resilience—for communities facing health impacts from climate change, corporations managing risk, and insurance companies protecting investments.