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No Straight Path to Sustainability Leadership: A Climate Week NYC Conversation on Women, Resilience, and Leading in an Age of Resistance
Hosted by The SustainabilityX® Magazine | A Climate Week NYC Official Event Recap
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Summary
The official Climate Week NYC 2026 virtual event, "Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: No Straight Path to Sustainability Leadership — Non-Linear Journeys, Resilience, and Leading in an Age of Resistance," hosted by The SustainabilityX® Magazine in tandem with the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA81), brought together women leaders whose careers have crossed governance, business, climate science, meteorology, journalism, communications, academia, entrepreneurship, and sustainability leadership. Part of Supriya Verma’s Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: Leadership Lessons in an Age of Resistance (2026) virtual book tour, the event featured personal reflections from Supriya Verma, Katie Elder, Jaclyn Whittal, Tensie Whelan, and Roberta Boscolo, exploring how non-linear career pathways, transferable skills, lived experiences, and personal turning points shape women's leadership. The conversation highlighted systems thinking, alternative governance models, climate storytelling, sustainable business, empathy, resilience, reinvention, gender justice, women's representation in decision-making, and the importance of leading authentically amid growing uncertainty and resistance. Bringing together a global audience of women and male allies, the event reinforced that non-linear journeys are not weaknesses but sources of perspective, credibility, and strength.
The SustainabilityX® Magazine was proud to host Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: No Straight Path to Sustainability Leadership as part of Climate Week NYC 2026, continuing the global dialogue inspired by Verma’s debut book on women's leadership, sustainability, systems change, and what it means to remain anchored in one's values, embrace empathy as a strength, and "Be the Lighthouse" while navigating the personal, professional, and political challenges of an age of resistance.
During Climate Week NYC 2026, The SustainabilityX® Magazine hosted the official virtual event Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: No Straight Path to Sustainability Leadership — Non-Linear Journeys, Resilience, and Leading in an Age of Resistance.
Moderated by Supriya Verma, Founder of The SustainabilityX® Magazine, Chief Sustainability Officer at Belnor Engineering, and author of Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: Leadership Lessons in an Age of Resistance, the event brought together women leaders working across governance, climate communications, sustainable business, climate science, energy, and systems change.
Held during the week of the 81st United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week NYC, the conversation asked a timely question:
How do women build meaningful sustainability careers when their paths do not follow a straight line — and how do they continue leading without losing themselves in an age of uncertainty, backlash, and resistance?
Participants joined from around the world, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, Egypt, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, and beyond. The global turnout reflected the growing resonance of the event’s central theme: that women across geographies, sectors, generations, and life stages are asking many of the same questions about leadership, belonging, resilience, and purpose.
A Book Tour Conversation Rooted in a Larger Question
The event was part of the virtual book tour for Verma’s debut book, Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: Leadership Lessons in an Age of Resistance, which launched in March 2026 during Women’s Month.
Since its release, the book has sparked hundreds of conversations with women across industries, demographics, generations, identities, and geographies. As Verma shared in her opening remarks, many of those conversations have returned to similar questions:
How do I keep leading when the world feels uncertain?How do I stay anchored in my values?How do I continue without losing myself?
The book’s structure reflects those questions. The first half shares leadership lessons from women across sustainability, climate, governance, business, science, and systems change, including Roberta Boscolo and Tensie Whelan, who joined the Climate Week NYC event as speakers. A turning point section brings in reflections from 16 more women in a roundtable format. The second half explores practical pathways for moving forward, including resilience, authenticity, community, healing as a leadership strategy, and what it means for women to keep leading without abandoning themselves.
For Verma, the book is not only about women redefining leadership across sustainability, justice, governance, and systems change. It is also about something deeper: how women continue to lead when the world becomes harder, when backlash grows louder, and when the systems around them were not designed with them in mind.
Climate Leadership Is Also About Gender, Justice, and Power
The event opened against the backdrop of recent devastating floods in Nepal, where lives were lost, families were displaced, infrastructure was damaged, and communities faced a long road to recovery.
Verma connected the disaster to one of the core reasons she wrote the book: women around the world repeatedly bear the brunt of the climate crisis, yet they remain underrepresented in the rooms where climate decisions are made.
Women and girls are often among those facing urgent and unequal burdens after disaster, including reduced access to food, safe water, health services, protection, and increased care responsibilities. The Nepal floods were presented not as an isolated tragedy, but as a reminder that climate impacts are not experienced equally.
That reality, Verma argued, means sustainability leadership cannot be separated from questions of gender, justice, resilience, representation, and power.
Katie Elder: Governance as a Pathway to Sustainability
The first speaker, Katie Elder, Founder of Good Principles™, reflected on the importance of governance in shaping whether organizations can live their values.
Elder began with the example of the Otter Co-op in British Columbia, where she gained early governance experience as a junior director on the board. At the time, she did not fully realize how exceptional the model was: a company legally designed to give back to its community, governed by local people who lived nearby, worked nearby, and used its products and services.
That experience became a thread throughout her career.
Elder described governance as the often-overlooked “G” in ESG: who makes decisions, how those decisions are made, and whose interests are weighed. Her career later took her through Queen’s University, Procter & Gamble, global product work in Singapore, a Master’s in Sustainability Leadership at Cambridge, and roles across founder-led startups, public family-controlled companies, private B Corps, and now Brightspot Climate, where she serves as inaugural Chair of the Board of Directors and Board of Trustees.
Brightspot Climate recently transitioned into an employee ownership trust, a model Elder described as part of a broader need to explore alternative forms of business ownership and governance.
Her message was clear: different governance models are not only possible, they are essential to creating impact.
Following the event, Katie also shared additional resources for participants interested in navigating a career in sustainability. Through Good Principles™, she offers a Maven course, Finding Purpose: Navigating to a Career in Sustainability, designed to support people exploring how to align their skills, values, and professional path with meaningful sustainability work. You can find out more about her course offerings on Maven here, and connect with Katie on LinkedIn here.
For those seeking sustainability careers, Elder encouraged people to ask how an organization is governed, where decisions are made, and how close they can be to shaping upstream impact.
Jaclyn Whittal: Climate Communication Begins With People
Jaclyn Whittal, Meteorologist, Climate Journalist, and Founder and CEO of One Earth Communications, brought a powerful storytelling and communications lens to the conversation.
Whittal’s own path has been anything but linear. She began in music and musical theatre, performing on stages around the world before eventually returning to school for operational meteorology. Her first weather job took her to Regina, Saskatchewan, where an unexpected opportunity to chase storms changed the direction of her career.
She described witnessing the aftermath of the devastating Joplin, Missouri tornado early in her reporting career, an experience that profoundly shaped how she approached interviews, grief, trauma, and climate-related storytelling.
Over the years, Whittal covered hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, droughts, and extreme weather events. But for a long time, she said, climate-linked disasters felt like something she could report on and then leave behind. That changed when she moved to British Columbia and experienced climate impacts in her own backyard, including extreme heat, atmospheric rivers, infrastructure damage, and wildfire evacuation risk.
That shift helped her fully join the climate movement.
Today, through One Earth Communications, Whittal helps companies, NGOs, and organizations tell climate and sustainability stories in ways that are accessible, human-centered, and grounded in lived experience.
Her message to the audience was especially resonant for anyone navigating imposter syndrome or reinvention: action leads to momentum. Rather than waiting to feel fully qualified, she encouraged people to begin, listen, learn, and trust the skills they already carry.
Tensie Whelan: Sustainability Requires Systems Thinking, Business Literacy, and Win-Win Solutions
Tensie Whelan, Distinguished Professor of Practice Emerita in Business and Society and Senior Adviser at the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business, shared a deeply systems-oriented view of sustainability leadership.
Whelan began by noting that people working in sustainability often have to understand complex systems, persuade across differences, engage stakeholders, and identify win-win solutions. For that reason, she said, sustainability people are often among the most interesting people in the room.
Her own career has crossed journalism, civil society, conservation, advocacy, nonprofit leadership, sustainable business, and academia. Raised between urban New York, rural Vermont, and time in Latin America, Whelan was shaped by multiple worlds: social reform, environmental conservation, local and international contexts, and competing political perspectives.
A key lesson came during her time in Latin America, where she saw that environmental campaigns, while well-intentioned, could create unintended harm if they failed to account for livelihoods and local realities. That experience reinforced the importance of finding solutions that work for both people and the planet.
As President of the Rainforest Alliance, Whelan helped grow the organization significantly while focusing on how markets could drive sustainability at speed and scale. Later, at NYU Stern, she founded the Center for Sustainable Business to build the evidence base for the business case for sustainability.
Whelan emphasized that sustainability professionals must understand business fundamentals, finance, risk, marketing, supply chains, and value creation. In a moment of ESG backlash, she argued, the work must move beyond reporting and compliance toward action, performance, and impact.
Her advice to people building sustainability careers was practical: focus less on finding the “perfect” linear next step and more on the skills, experiences, and impact you want to build.
Roberta Boscolo: From Climate Science to Empathy, Listening, and Resilience
The final speaker, Roberta Boscolo, Head of the Climate and Energy Unit at the World Meteorological Organization, brought the conversation directly into climate science, energy resilience, and the human dimensions of climate work.
Boscolo traced her path back to childhood in Italy, where she was fascinated by Antarctica, nature, and the immensity of the planet. Strong in mathematics, she was drawn toward science, data, models, and the desire to understand how the planet and universe work.
Her early career began in climate research, including work with the World Climate Research Programme. But as climate science increasingly revealed the urgency of human-driven climate change, Boscolo felt called to move beyond science alone. She wanted to help translate data into understanding, policy, and action.
At first, she believed evidence and facts would be enough to persuade people. Over time, she realized something crucial: people needed not only to be shown the data, but listened to.
That changed her approach. Instead of trying to win people over with facts alone, Boscolo began asking what mattered to them, what they feared, what they hoped for, and how climate science could connect to people’s values and lives.
She emphasized that empathy did not weaken her science. It gave the science somewhere to go.
Working with communities across Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and beyond, Boscolo saw how climate information becomes real when it helps people decide when to plant, how to manage water, where to build energy infrastructure, and how to prepare for hazards. She also saw, again and again, that women are often among the first to feel the impacts of climate change and among the least likely to be asked what should be done.
Her message was both scientific and deeply human: resilience is choosing hope again and again.
Reinvention, Belonging, and the Skills Sustainability Needs Now
The moderated Q&A expanded the conversation into reinvention, career pivots, women’s representation in decision-making, skills for sustainability careers, and the future of finance.
One major theme was reinvention. Many women are currently navigating burnout, layoffs, caregiving, entrepreneurship, career change, and a desire for more meaningful work. Speakers reflected on how detours, personal challenges, and unexpected life events can become part of a person’s leadership foundation.
Another theme was the importance of communications. Whittal noted that organizations increasingly need people who can make climate and sustainability issues digestible, relatable, and human. Listening, empathy, storytelling, and the ability to connect with people are not soft extras. They are critical skills.
Elder added that many people do not need to abandon their existing skill sets to enter sustainability. Instead, they can bring sustainability into their current areas of expertise, whether communications, supply chain, finance, HR, strategy, or operations.
Whelan stressed that those seeking leadership roles in sustainability must learn the language of business and finance. To influence decision-making, sustainability professionals need to understand how organizations create value, manage risk, and make strategic choices.
The speakers also discussed women’s representation in leadership, the need to move women closer to decision-making spaces, and how networks, communities, and allies can help create the conditions for change.
Be the Lighthouse
A recurring idea throughout the event was Verma’s phrase: Be the Lighthouse.
At many of her book events and talks this year, Verma shared, when women ask how to keep going, her answer has often been: be the lighthouse.
To her, that means standing tall and strong despite the personal, professional, and political winds shifting around us. It means staying anchored in one’s values, leading from authenticity, embracing empathy as a strength, and remembering that resilience is not about pretending the storm is not there. It is about staying grounded while continuing to shine.
That theme will continue into Verma’s forthcoming podcast, Like a Lighthouse™, launching in 2027, which will explore life and leadership in an age of resistance.
No Single Path, No Single Way to Lead
The event closed by returning to its central idea: there is no single path into sustainability leadership, and there is no single way to lead.
For some, the path begins with science. For others, business, journalism, law, governance, communications, entrepreneurship, advocacy, community, or lived experience. For many women, the path is also shaped by caregiving, burnout, grief, motherhood, migration, recovery, identity shifts, family responsibilities, reinvention, and the quiet courage of continuing when the way forward is unclear.
The speakers showed that these experiences do not make leadership less credible. They can make it more human, more grounded, more connected, and more necessary.
In an age of resistance, the work ahead is not only to build more sustainable economies, organizations, and communities. It is also to build forms of leadership that do not require women to erase themselves in order to be taken seriously.
As Verma reminded the audience:
Your path does not have to be linear to matter.
Sometimes we do not go from A to B.
Sometimes we go from A to C to B.
And sometimes what looks like a detour becomes the very foundation from which we lead.
Stay connected with The SustainabilityX® Magazine for the event recording, future book tour updates, upcoming Climate Week conversations, book clubs, and more events on women’s leadership, sustainability, systems change, and leading in an age of resistance.
View the full event on our YouTube channel here.
About The SustainabilityX® Magazine
The SustainabilityX® Magazine is an award-winning, digital, female-founded, and female-led non-profit initiative bringing the environment and economy together for a sustainable future through dialogue, and now transforming the environment and economy for a sustainable future through the power of women's leadership. Founded on May 8, 2016, and inspired by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals by Canada's Top 30 Under 30 in Sustainability Leadership awardee and author of "Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: Leadership Lessons in an Age of Resistance" (2026), Supriya Verma, the digital media initiative focuses on approaching the world's most pressing challenges with a holistic, integrated, systems-based perspective as opposed to the traditional and ineffective siloed approach with a single lens on interdisciplinary topics like climate and energy. This initiative ultimately seeks to explore how to effectively bring the environment and economy together through intellectual, insightful dialogue and thought-provoking discussion amongst individuals across sectors taking an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to untangling the intricate web of sustainability while championing women's leadership in sustainability.
The SustainabilityX® Magazine is built upon the four foundational pillars of sustainability: Environmental Stewardship, which emphasizes the importance of improving environmental health; Economic Prosperity, which promotes sustainable economic growth that transcends traditional capitalist models; Social Inclusion, which focuses on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) for BIPOC, LGBTQ, and other marginalized or vulnerable communities; and Just Governance, which highlights responsible leadership, the equal application of the rule of law, and the creation of fair systems for all.
As we expand our mission to align with the Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs), we continue to explore the diverse and interconnected factors that influence sustainability. By recognizing how these elements interact across local, national, and international levels, we aim to accelerate progress toward sustainability goals. In essence, this aligns with The SustainabilityX® Magazine's vision of integrating environmental and economic progress for a more just, inclusive, and sustainable future through thoughtful dialogue.
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