Celebrating Success and Recommitting to Sustainability

The UN’s latest climate report — published in advance of COP30, which takes place Nov. 5–21 in Belém, Brazil — has announced that the world’s collective decarbonization plans "barely move the needle" on the 1.5-degree Celsius target objective, and it lands with a dull thud. Not because it isn’t true, but because it adds to the fatigue felt by those of us working in sustainability.

It’s hard not to feel the weight of slow progress — the distance between our urgency and the world’s pace. I confessed as much on a recent The Meeting Room podcast, sharing that some days it feels impossible to believe we’ll get there, that sometimes our efforts feel like a single sandbag against the flood that swept away everything except Noah and his ark.

After that confession, one of my team reminded me of something I’d lost sight of: that change rarely happens in the grand, cinematic sense we crave. There will be no symbolic VJ-Day kiss if we overcome our planetary challenges. Change is the slow, unglamorous accumulation of marginal gains — actions so small they often seem invisible until you look back.

That’s what I think the media narrative around the UN report misses. It’s not that the needle hasn’t moved. It has — albeit too slowly, too quietly and almost imperceptibly.

The big reports tell us that collectively we’re not on track, and we need to take heed. But beneath those headlines are thousands of companies, cities and individuals reshaping how they work, build and consume. Progress is happening. Even though it is uneven, imperfect and frustratingly slow, it is undeniable.

I see it daily in the events industry. Venues investing in solar farms, not just buying renewable power. Suppliers sourcing, testing and rolling out alternative materials and resource management systems. Organizers collaborating on anti-disposable initiatives, and creative agencies creating processes, frameworks and methodologies that embed better by design, not as an add-on. Planners have a wealth of options at their disposal, and from procurement to purchasing to planning, the tide has turned. Sometimes we’re swimming against it, stuck in the old ways, but these new realities are not footnotes. They are the early chapters of transformation, and they need acceleration, not dismissal.

Framing the story as "barely moving the needle" risks alienating us — event planners — the very people doing the work. The problem isn’t that we’re failing; it’s that we’re not yet fast enough and our sector isn’t yet working at scale.

Progress feels slow and fraught, because the world is restless. People are disillusioned with politics, disconnected from power and angry at inequality. Voting patterns that seem like a rejection of environmental policy are often simply a rejection of bad policy — of systems that fail to deliver a better life. Beneath the noise, people still want cleaner air, safer futures, fairer economies.

Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City and other Democratic gains this week in U.S. elections show that politics will always swing. But business doesn’t. We get hit by the pendulum, take the blows and find balance again because business has a goal it keeps moving towards. That’s why real progress doesn’t evaporate when a government changes or a policy stalls. The direction of travel is already embedded in boardrooms, budgets and supply chains.

Once change begins, it’s hard to stop. You can’t uninvent a clean energy system. You can’t unlearn a better way of building. You can’t unmake a generation of professionals who see sustainability as the baseline, not the bonus. The infrastructure for a new economy is already here — it just needs to be scaled.

We are problem-solvers by nature. We’ve rebuilt after crises and adapted under pressure, and we’ve found ways to keep doors open. We call it resilience, but resilience shouldn’t be a permanent state. It’s what we draw on when the storm hits — not how we define our identity.

What we need is endurance, because this is just the beginning. Getting started is the hardest part, and we’ve done it.

The findings of the UN report provide an opportunity for a collective recommitment by the industry to keep going: to know we can look left, look right and see our peers keeping pace beside us. Because that’s when our individual efforts start to compound. The progress that feels small today becomes unstoppable when it’s part of a common momentum.

So while nations may struggle to move the dial, events can be a different story. We don’t see borders, and we bring people together across territories, sectors and ideologies. We create space for collaboration, for connection that transcends politics. 

We build momentum for sectors around the world. Now we need to turn that same force on ourselves. This is a global industry with a trillion-dollar reach. We don’t have to be the sandbag. We can be the flood.

Anna Abdelnoor is the founder and CEO of the nonprofit organization isla, and carbon measurement platform TRACE, focused on creating a sustainable future for events. She was named an Influential #EventProf by Northstar Meetings Group in 2022.