Climate Week NYC 2026 Recap: What Supply Chain and Sustainability Leaders Should Do Next

<p>Supply chain was rarely in the title at New York Climate Week 2026, but it was in every answer. In this Revolution Roundtable, recorded live on LinkedIn days after the week closed, Sheri Hinish brings together three practitioners to compare notes on what they saw, what felt real, what felt performative, and what executive teams should do differently on Monday morning.</p><p>Sandy Leyva, co-founder of Sustainability Decoded, is an engineer who works at the intersection of supply chain and sustainability. Wesley Herche, PhD, co-founder of Sustainability Decoded, is a former U.S. intelligence officer who now works across solar, battery storage, EV charging infrastructure, and on-site power. James George, founder of Provocative Human and a Supply Chain Revolution collaborator since 2020, spent 12 years as a Royal Navy clearance diver before moving into circular economy work with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. He now advises on critical minerals and rare earth supply chain risk in defense, aerospace, and automotive.</p><p>Each panelist names the week in one word: locked in, interdependence, economics, and access. The conversation then moves to the investor who told a room to stop framing climate action as an environmental choice, the quiet disappearance of net zero, the rollback of the Chief Sustainability Officer role and its cost to technical expertise and to women in the C-suite, and whether every job is now both a technology job and a sustainability job. An audience question brings the missing Scope 3 stakeholder into the room: the small and mid-sized supplier asked to fund the transition on margins that cannot absorb it.</p><p> The roundtable closes with three decisions for Monday morning: price volatility itself, put critical materials on the risk register with a named owner, and treat disruption as information.</p><p> <b><strong>Chapter Markers:</strong></b></p><p>0:00 Welcome to the post-Climate Week Revolution Roundtable</p><p>0:57 Introductions: Sandy Leyva, Wesley Herche, James George</p><p>3:53 One word for Climate Week NYC 2026</p><p>6:10 "Stop telling me we're doing this for environmental reasons"</p><p>8:28 Supply chain was in every answer</p><p>10:03 The value was in the room, not on stage</p><p>11:44 What changed: net zero fades from the agenda</p><p>12:51 What felt performative: folding in the CSO role</p><p>14:19 The double loss: technical expertise and women in the C-suite</p><p>18:15 Is every job a technology job?</p><p>21:52 Is every j