The SC Johnson College of Business and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability welcome global leaders in sustainable finance for a high-impact session spotlighting 2026 Finance for the Future Award winners. In collaboration with Accounting for sustainability, this session will feature lightning talks and panel insights from leaders of organizations driving innovation in areas such as climate-smart infrastructure, nature-based solutions, inclusive finance, and ESG transformation. 

The Concordia Annual Summit convenes the world’s most prominent business, government, and nonprofit leaders to foster dialogue and enable effective partnerships for positive social impact. This global affairs forum examines the world’s most pressing challenges to identify avenues for collaboration. Cornell Atkinson is pleased to serve as a Core Programming Partner for the 2026 Summit.

Featured panel – Teaching, Learning, and Leading in the Age of AI: A Vision for Higher Education with Cornell Provost Kavita Bala | 4:45pm
AI is no longer on the horizon for higher education. It is already here, and the decisions institutions make today will shape the future of teaching, learning, and opportunity for generations to come. Higher education has always been where the next generation of leaders, thinkers, and innovators are shaped, and AI is fundamentally changing what that responsibility looks like. In this session, industry and academia leaders explore what thoughtful AI adoption really looks like, the hard questions, the responsible choices, and what it means to prepare students not just for the workforce of today, but for a future that is still being written. What does it mean to educate the next generation when the tools, the rules, and the world itself are still being defined?

Note: Paid registration is required to attend the Concordia Summit. 

This collaborative conversation will dive into the evolving role of U.S. universities in supporting multilateral action on climate and sustainability.

During the evening events, we will explore how U.S. universities can become more reliable, organized, and constructive partners in a moment when sustained engagement, trusted expertise, and institutional continuity are especially needed. A stronger partnership model, attentive to current geopolitical circumstances, could create more regular two-way dialogue: the United Nations system helping define the knowledge, training, and technical needs emerging from practice, and universities responding with timely research, policy translation, executive education, scientific advice, capacity building, and collaborative programs.

​At a time when multilateral cooperation faces significant pressure, this program will offer a hopeful and practical message: the work is not only ongoing, it can become stronger, faster, and more effective when institutions act together. By bringing universities and the UN into a more deliberate partnership, we can better connect knowledge to action and help meet the scale of the global climate and sustainability challenges before us.

Participation in this event is by invitation only. If you would like to request an invitation, please contact atkinson@cornell.edu. 

The Concordia Annual Summit convenes the world’s most prominent business, government, and nonprofit leaders to foster dialogue and enable effective partnerships for positive social impact. This global affairs forum examines the world’s most pressing challenges to identify avenues for collaboration. Cornell Atkinson is pleased to serve as a Core Programming Partner for the 2026 Summit.

Note: Paid registration is required to attend the Concordia Summit. 

Join Cornell Atkinson and the Degrees Initiative as we unveil a new era of SRM evaluation: the first truly global study on SRM impacts.

Degrees Initiative and Cornell are working with a coalition of partners from the Global South and North to launch a study on how SRM will affect agriculture. Research teams in nine developing regions, plus China, plus the Global North, will use the same data, the same research protocols, and the same SRM scenarios, to explore how warming and SRM could affect staple crops.

This is what the future of SRM research should look like: a global partnership working together to evaluate one of the most important climate impacts. Come and meet the partner organizations and some of the Southern scientists, learn about the studies, and try foods from some of the regions being studied!

Participation in this event is by invitation only. If you would like to request an invitation, please contact Shaun Doherty at sjd254@cornell.edu.

Concern about biodiversity as a business issue is gaining momentum. Globally, examples such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) point toward growing regulatory and stakeholder interest in compelling the private sector to take action to stem biodiversity losses. As pressure builds for companies to measure, disclose, and limit impacts on ecosystems – as well as to identify risks and opportunities to value chains stemming from biodiversity loss or amelioration – is there an opportunity for companies to frame biodiversity as a strategic asset? What data, technologies, or investments are needed to make the issue a driver of competition and performance for industry?

Participation in this event is by invitation only. If you would like to request an invitation, please contact atkinson@cornell.edu.

Building on New York’s push for a clean energy future, the 2026 Nuclear Symposium focuses on delivering clean, safe, reliable, and affordable power at scale, across the nation. Day one focuses on New York and the Northeast region, bridging the gap between communities and the governments, developers, and utilities that have long shaped the energy landscape.

Building on New York’s push for a clean energy future, the 2026 Nuclear Symposium focuses on delivering clean, safe, reliable, and affordable power at scale, across the nation. Day two opens up critical discussions around workforce development, new infrastructure and nuclear in a time of growing energy demand and need for affordability. The symposium closes with a grand networking reception.

As New York State’s battery deployment accelerates to support grid modernization and address growing energy and capacity needs, the urgency of advancing battery circularity is also increasing. Scaling of battery circularity requires deliberate choices across material sourcing, manufacturing, end-of-life management, and policy. We’re convening researchers, industry leaders, and policymakers to build a shared understanding of the circularity landscape, surface the top barriers and opportunities, and connect the diverse organizations working across the battery value chain.

Whether your focus is grid modernization, battery manufacturing, sourcing, end-of-life management and recycling, policy, or investment, this gathering brings together the ecosystem to help advance sustainable battery systems in the Northeast.

Participation in this event is by invitation only. If you would like to request an invitation, please contact Shaun Doherty at sjd254@cornell.edu.

How do we move to the cleanest possible electricity grid as quickly as possible while meeting the surging power demand created by AI and data center growth? These are often treated as competing problems — decarbonization on one side, load growth on the other — but solving either in isolation risks undermining the other. This session treats them as a single, integrated challenge.

Cornell Atkinson convenes a small, cross-sector roundtable bringing together leaders across power generation, large-load and data center operations, energy policy, and clean-energy finance for a focused working conversation. Rather than a panel or a series of presentations, the format is a facilitated discussion designed to let stakeholders help shape the engagement — surfacing the most pressing questions practitioners face and identifying where research, data, and new partnerships can deliver real impact.

Grounded in the Northeast — where New York’s evolving regulatory landscape offers a live test case — the discussion aims to frame a shared agenda for high-impact research and engagement that helps solve the problem.

Participation in this event is by invitation only. If you would like to request an invitation, please contact Shaun Doherty at sjd254@cornell.edu.

This roundtable will convene participants from Cornell, SUNY Binghamton, CATF, New York State, and key external partners to review the current status of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability-funded joint modeling project and its ongoing sensitivity analyses.   The discussion will focus on interpreting recent scenario outputs—including projected emissions trajectories, system reliability outcomes under long‑term weather and climate conditions, and comparative energy cost implications.

Participants will work collaboratively to identify and refine the set of priority scenarios the model should evaluate next to explore viable pathways for New York’s decarbonization goals given recent policy changes. We will identify public processes where the model’s insights can help the state develop effective policies and programs and ways to communicate our results with the public. The session aims to produce a clear, shared direction for the next phase of modeling and to strengthen coordination across institutions engaged in long‑term energy system planning.

Participation in this event is by invitation only. If you would like to request an invitation, please contact Shaun Doherty at sjd254@cornell.edu.

Heritage-informed decarbonization applies the wisdom, places, and practices of the past to minimize greenhouse gas emissions in the present and future. It safeguards and generates cultural value—the shared practices and identities that connect people to each other. Heritage-informed decarbonization solutions include the use of traditional, repairable, low-carbon materials; materials salvage and reuse; heating, cooling, and ventilation strategies; climate-responsive design features; occupant behaviors; urban planning practices; cultural practices and relationships; and the recovery, restoration, and transmission of knowledge. Through its Action Agenda, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has recognized the Plan to Accelerate Heritage-Informed Building Decarbonization as a framework to scale these proven solutions through policy.

This gathering at Climate Week NYC brings together community leaders, policymakers, heritage and built environment practitioners to learn more about the role of culture and cultural heritage in global climate action. Convened by the Climate Heritage Network, Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, ICOMOS, ICLEI, World Monuments Fund, and Architecture 2030, panelists will focus on what steps are needed to strengthen policymakers’ capacity to integrate heritage solutions into climate change mitigation policies in the building and construction sector by 2030. Participants will learn about synergies with policy efforts prioritizing whole-life carbon reductions, energy efficiency, and materials circularity, and the coalition’s immediate goals for COP 31 and beyond.

As we look toward the next presidential transition, the Dialogue will examine how to strengthen the federal environmental science ecosystem so that it is resilient, decision-ready, and equipped to address emerging environmental challenges. Participants will explore how scientific knowledge can be more effectively integrated into government decision-making through sustained relationships, institutional capacity, and mechanisms that connect the scientific community with the public sector.

Participation in this event is by invitation only. If you would like to request an invitation, please contact atkinson@cornell.edu.