On Sept. 29, the 16th annual NYC Climate Week came to a close. The event, a partnership between the global nonprofit the Climate Group, the United Nations General Assembly, and the City of New York, included more than 600 events across the city. 

Throughout the week, reporters from the Columbia Journalism School’s Climate Reporting class fanned out across the city to cover some of the most crucial conversations and to ask attendees about how their work and their lives intersect with climate change. Here’s what they had to say.

“I believe that everybody deserves to have access to nutrient-rich food. Agriculture is becoming more and more challenging and we have to produce more food than ever before in human history to feed everyone. We need to work together, not compete with each other, to meet this daunting task in sustainability.”

“Climate change is the compounding effects of our changing climate which is due predominantly to human activities which are causing rising temperatures, too much carbon in the atmosphere, warming of our oceans, increasing extreme weather events — storm surges, wildfires, all that crazy stuff that we’re seeing today.”

“It’s inspiring,” he said, to see “young people out here, as well as elders. And so, I think events like this make me feel more hopeful and further reinforce my commitment to this work, staying involved, however I can.”

“There are parts of the world where it’s so devastating at the present moment, and then we sit here, you know, in the material West, causing the pollution. We don’t feel the effects in the same way because America has this way of dumping its problems on the rest of the world.”

“Earlier today, we started with a little bit of yoga, almost like a breathing exercise. It was like, ‘Ok, we can do this,’ like let’s center ourselves to have the energy to move forward and continue this movement towards fighting climate change. So, it’s been really interesting the way the younger generation is looking at it from both the science and technology side, but also from an emotional, caring side, which is really good. So, that’s been new for me, and it’s been really nice.”

“I am focusing on a lot of traditional ecological knowledge in the way that I do my work, and thinking more about stewardship, and how really to do that in a more well-managed and respectful way,” Bataille said.

“We now currently have a good amount of organizations that are rushing to have partnerships, but they don’t really know that there are still pains that a lot of communities remember from previous partnerships that went bad.”

“Fiber-to-fiber recycling at scale is the missing piece. Right now, there’s a lot of collection of used clothing, but not all of it is recyclable. We need better systems for sorting, reuse, and recycling so these materials can actually be used again before being turned into new fibers. That’s the future we need to work toward.”

“Reuse has to be a big piece of the future puzzle, but it’s not the only thing we can do. We currently have a flood of new goods entering the market each year, which props up a robust reuse market. But what we need is a balanced ecosystem where fewer new clothes are produced, but they’re made better – with sustainable materials and fair labor practices. And we need strong reuse and repair systems to complement that.”