I woke up this morning thinking about New York Climate Week.
- Excited to meet new people, reconnect with old colleagues, and build community.
- Excited by the quality and depth of people coming to the events I’m co-hosting, ranging from deeply thoughtful and regenerative, to strategically corporate, to exclusively private, to silly and fun.
- Excited to connect with clients in person and advance their goals in the softer, more relational ways that are hard to replicate on Zoom.
- Excited to participate in a few events, learn, have some of my beliefs challenged, and look for “signal in the noise.”
- Excited to eat at delicious restaurants and rediscover the joy and deep love I have for a city where I lived for seven years.
But what I realized I’m perhaps most excited about is seeing the antithesis of the marketing gloss telling us how well everything is working and what a great job everyone is doing.
And then I started seeing the announcements.
For the record, there is nothing wrong with making announcements during Climate Week (I’m doing it too, stay tuned).
When people who haven’t been ask me what Climate Week is actually about, I often say that it is, in large part, a massive marketing splash for people working on climate, with a whole lot of smart people in town still trying to get real things done.
I don’t mean to dismiss the marketing splash. Many of those announcements are the culmination of years of critical, thoughtful work.
But when the marketers are leading the story rather than the strategists, procurement teams, operators, risk departments, investors, regulators, or the people actually implementing the work, we risk living in a world where the tail wags the dog.
The announcement becomes the thing.
Finding signal in that flurry requires putting those announcements back into context.
What actually happened?
Who committed to what?
Was money deployed? Was something purchased? Did a project move from concept to construction? Did somebody create a new standard, market mechanism, piece of infrastructure, or institution?
Or did we mostly announce that we intend to announce progress?
So, dear reader who maintains a healthy degree of skepticism toward big sweeping announcements and is also looking for signal in the noise, I am pleased to announce:
The Climate Announcement Harvester.
I built an agentic workflow that scans the internet several times a day — including public LinkedIn signals, event calendars, organizational announcements, company newsrooms, and other sources.
It looks for announcements, verifies and structures them, connects the organizations and initiatives involved, and runs them through a QA process before they clear the filter.
Then a second agent independently reviews the record: checking the sourcing, whether the description accurately reflects the underlying material, whether something is a duplicate, whether the taxonomy makes sense, and whether the thing being announced is actually as concrete as it sounds. Anything ambiguous gets surfaced for human review rather than quietly waved through.
And because no harvesting system will catch everything, there’s also a form to submit an announcement, or correct something already in there.
Over Climate Week, I’ll keep the system running live, pressure-test it, use the conversations I’m having to improve it, and see what we can learn from the resulting dataset about what is actually being announced.
There are two ways to explore it:
- Via the Interface: also embedded below. This is the richer version: you can filter by industry, announcement type, stage, entity, and other dimensions; open individual records; inspect how they’ve evolved; and interact with Airtable’s built-in AI.
- Via List View: a simpler way to browse the underlying dataset, expand individual records, and apply your own filters.
My hope isn’t to create another feed of climate news.
It’s to make the announcements easier to interrogate, and to start building a free, crowdsourced framework that helps people trying to advance climate progress make sense of what is actually changing.
What are we seeing more of?
Where is capital moving?
Where are buyers showing up?
What is moving from pilot to deployment?
What new market infrastructure is emerging?
And, perhaps more importantly, where is all of this activity not translating into change?
If you find this useful, please share it with someone else who might too.
And if you’re curious about how I built the workflow, the information architecture underneath it, or want access to the backend to adapt it for your own purposes, please get in touch.