As the City of London Corporation marks the fifth instalment of the Net Zero Delivery Summit this week, I reflect on the world we were in back in 2022. Only four years ago businesses and communities were recovering from Covid, war had returned to the European continent with the invasion of Ukraine, and surging fuel and food prices were driving global inflation to historic levels. Since then, global instability has only deepened, with conflict in the Middle East and tariff wars disrupting global trade.
We have to face a difficult truth that the relative stability among major powers that has defined the period since the Second World War – what the historian John Lewis Gaddis called the Long Peace – was actually more of an anomaly. We are living through a period of more volatile geopolitics, faster-moving innovation, and fiercer global competition for investment than at almost any point in recent memory.”
When I travel to overseas markets as Lady Mayor, however, one thing remains constant. Whatever the local view on net zero or climate change, businesses and government leaders are acutely aware that climate resilience is no longer a nice-to-have or an afterthought, it’s critical. Putting my insurance hat on for a moment: global natural catastrophes have increased five-fold over the past 50 years, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The 2025 California wildfires are estimated to have cost insurers around $40bn, among the largest insured losses on record for a wildfire event. The business case for greater climate resilience and adaptation makes itself. So does the case for accelerating the transition to clean energy in our heavy-emitting industries, and for scaling up carbon credit markets. These measures don’t just give us a genuine chance to ease the mounting pressures of climate change, they create jobs, opportunity and innovation here in the UK and globally.
Stop dithering on climate action
But I sense among business and sustainability leaders a real appetite to move beyond the stop-start approach and dithering on climate action. They want to know who’s getting results consistently, who has a model we can follow, who has the talent and expertise to execute at scale, and where they can easily raise capital for clean energy projects. That answer is unequivocally London. During my mayoralty, I’ve partnered with City trade associations and businesses to launch the Team UK campaign, amplifying a confident, evidence-based narrative of London and the UK’s strengths as a global financial hub. We’re the largest and most active capital market in Europe, we have the most fintechs in Europe, we’re the third biggest tech hub globally – and we do just as well in sustainable and green finance. That’s a story we need to shout about; it’s one the world needs to hear.
The UK is the largest market globally for project-level financing for clean energy, the biggest in Europe for private investment in green tech, and has topped the global green finance centre rankings for eight consecutive editions. The mayoralty is about connecting capital with opportunity, and that’s exactly why events like the Net Zero Delivery Summit at the heart of London Climate Action Week, with the likes of Bloomberg partnering, are so important. It’s where the right leaders convene, the right conversations happen, and new partnerships are made that turn commitment into action.
Mark Carney, now Canada’s Prime Minister, was a keynote speaker at one of our early climate finance summits, back when he was Governor of the Bank of England. His words from a speech that same era still ring true today: “Once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.” In my role as Lady Mayor the best I can do is set the stage for world leaders to come together and chart a course of greater action – that stage is in the Square Mile and it meets at the Net Zero Delivery Summit.
By City AM
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