More than 100,000 people are expected to attend more than 1,000 events in New York City during Climate Week next week, the annual gathering that runs alongside the United Nations General Assembly. The turnout reflects the scale of global attention on climate change, but it also raises a difficult question: after years of summits, pledges and conference rooms filled with delegates, why is the climate crisis still worsening?

The last 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record. In 2024, the world experienced its first calendar year with temperatures more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and scientists expect the longer-term average to cross that threshold within the next decade. In Nepal, a catastrophic glacier collapse and flood last month killed more than 1,300 people and left thousands missing. Scientists concluded that climate change made the conditions behind the disaster more likely. In Europe, at least 35,000 additional people died from excess heat this past summer, driven by a rapidly warming climate.

Those developments make it easy to view another Climate Week as evidence that years of convening have failed. But that overlooks an important counterfactual: where would the world be without a decade of governments, companies, investors and others advancing climate action?

When the Paris agreement was adopted in 2015, the world was headed toward roughly 3 to 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming. National policies already in place now put the world on a roughly 2.8-degree path. Full implementation of countries’ existing climate pledges would reduce that further, to about 2.3 to 2.5 degrees.

That remains dangerously far from the necessary level of action, but it is also meaningful progress compared with the outlook a decade ago. Climate action has produced tangible results; it simply has not moved nearly fast enough.

One area that has not received the necessary attention and is the preservation of nature. There is no path to achieving climate goals that does not run through nature. Forests, wetlands and mangroves store carbon at scale, buffer storm surges, and stabilize the soils and waters on which economies depend. The world’s oceans alone absorb around 30% of all climate emissions each year.

Nature is climate infrastructure, yet it is also the least-funded part of the system.

As a veteran of past Climate Weeks, I expect participants to repeat a familiar call for more money for conservation and climate action. This year, however, another reality deserves equal attention: public money for climate and nature is drying up.

Government funding is under growing pressure everywhere, and investments in nature are particularly dependent on public funds. Public budgets have supplied roughly 80% of nature finance since 2010. Private investment is increasing—more than $14 billion flowed into nature in 2025—but remains far below the required scale. Meeting global climate, biodiversity and land-conservation goals will require around $570 billion in annual investment in nature by 2030.

Simply asking governments to provide more money will not close that gap. Public finance remains indispensable, particularly for communities and projects that cannot or should not generate commercial returns. But in an era of scarcity, every public dollar must work harder. The strongest finance models can multiply limited public funds, generate returns that can be reinvested, and reward investments that prevent losses before they reach balance sheets.

Nature is where those models are most needed, and where several are already being tested.

Leveraging public finance

Too often, public money pays for one project once. A stronger model uses limited public capital to absorb risks that commercial investors cannot comfortably bear, prepare projects for investment or otherwise improve their risk-return profile. Each public dollar can then attract additional private capital.

The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a global fund for forest conservation launched at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, last year, is one example of this approach. Its structure aims to combine $25 billion in government sponsor capital with up to $100 billion from institutional investors. Government capital will take on more of the risk, helping backstop bonds sold to pension funds and other large institutional investors.

Those investors will receive a conventional financial return, while the financing supports payments to tropical forest countries and Indigenous Peoples and local communities. At full scale, one public dollar could mobilize roughly four private dollars to keep tropical forests standing.

Building durable funding

Durability is another consideration. Traditional grants eventually run out, and many major conservation and climate funds periodically return to governments for replenishment. That exposes long-term investments to short-term fiscal and political cycles.

The TFFF addresses this by borrowing from the university endowment model: invest the capital, spend part of the returns and preserve the fund so it can continue generating income. Its capital is invested, with returns funding payments to tropical forest countries and a portion retained to compound. Over time, those retained earnings are intended to grow enough to repay government sponsors with interest while leaving a functioning fund behind.

That structure is designed for climate and conservation challenges that will outlast any single budget cycle.

Using insurance to finance resilience

Insurance offers another opportunity. Natural catastrophes caused an estimated $220 billion in global economic damage in 2025. Roughly half of losses from natural hazards worldwide are uninsured. In many emerging economies, 80% to 90% of catastrophic losses have no insurance coverage at all.

At the same time, investments in adaptation and resilience can yield as much as $10 in benefits and avoided costs for every dollar spent. That creates an opportunity to bring insurers into resilience investment before disasters occur.

Insurers already have a direct financial stake in reducing losses, and much of what reduces those losses is natural. Two stretches of coastline hit by the same storm will not necessarily produce the same claims if one retains natural protections such as mangroves. Effective resilience measures can protect property, reduce expected claims and help preserve insurability.

The insurance industry can become a partner in prevention by helping quantify the financial value of reduced risk, incorporating verified resilience measures into underwriting and pricing, and supporting investments that lower future losses. Where resilience produces measurable savings, those savings can help create an economic return for the parties that financed it.

Leverage, durability and insurance are the watchwords I hope to hear throughout Climate Week. The week should not be measured by how many people attend or how many panels fill conference rooms. It should be measured by whether the people who control capital leave with better ways to turn commitments into investment and investment into measurable results. Concretely, that means watching whether government sponsor capital firms up toward the TFFF’s $25 billion target, and whether insurers begin incorporating verified resilience measures into underwriting and pricing.

Different projects will require different structures, and some investments will always depend on public funding. But wherever credible revenue, savings or other financial value exists, scarce public dollars should help bring much larger pools of private capital to the table.

Climate Week has helped build a global constituency for action. To turn more of that momentum into implementation, the financial reality must be confronted, and the money that remains must be used more creatively. Scarcity should force smarter spending, not smaller ambition.

This commentary was originally published on Fortune.com. The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.