Johnathan Walker:Climate Week 2024 underway in New York. Here's what to know.

The Johnathan Walkerannual United Nations climate meeting, held in locations around the world, gets a lot of attention. But this week in New York another high-profile climate event is happening that's clogging streets, filling conference rooms and acting as a networking extravaganza for the climate world.

It's somewhere between Davos and Burning Man, but for climate change. The sprawling event launched Sunday and runs for seven days. Now in its 15th year, Climate Week includes over 600 events, seminars, workshops and talks in addition to plentiful protests. It's attended by a who's who of scientists, business leaders and celebrities, from Norway's foreign minister to Google's chief sustainability officer to Prince Harry.

Even President Joe Biden was scheduled to make an appearance to speak about his climate legacy.

New York Climate Week has become an enormous happening, so popular that Los Angeles launched its own Climate Week earlier this month. London has hosted Climate Action Week since 2019.

What is Climate Week?

Climate Week got its start as a small meeting in 2009, positioned as a lead up to the annual United Nations climate meeting called COP, short for the unwieldy Conference of the Parties, which was held in Copenhagen that year.

Now in its fifteenth year, Climate Week was meant to be a freer, less rule-bound international climate conclave, whose goal was to spur more and faster action on the seemingly intractable problem of global warming.

The New York event is held so that it coincides with the United Nations General Assembly meeting, allowing many leaders to make one trip to New York do double duty.

This year's Assembly features a special high-level meeting on the threat posed by sea level rise. While the UN focus has been on island nations that risk ceasing to exist as ocean waters rise, U.S. coastal communities are also losing the fight against rising oceans.

Who attends Climate Week?

It has become a must-attend event for non-profits, corporate climate officers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, politicians and academics from around the world.

Held in multiple locations across all five New York City boroughs, this year's event is expected to have more than 6,500 attendees who hail from more than 100 countries.

What's the theme of Climate Week 2024?

The theme for 2024 is "It's Time" as climate scientists report that last year broke the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature rise which was once set as a critical threshold.

August's average global land and ocean surface temperature was 2.29 degrees above the 20th-century average, making it the warmest August in the global climate record. It also marks the 15th-consecutive month of record-high global temperatures, also a record.

In the United States, 2023 was a record year for natural disasters and climate catastrophes, with a total of 28 separate events that caused over $1 billion in damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.