Broward County to host 2026 Southeast Florida climate summit
Broward will host the region’s climate leaders in Fort Lauderdale this November, but the real test is whether the summit produces fixes for flooding, heat and infrastructure strains now.
Broward County is bringing the 18th Annual Southeast Florida Climate Leadership Summit to the Broward County Convention Center and the Omni Hotel in Fort Lauderdale from Nov. 4 through Nov. 6, setting up a regional check-in on whether climate planning is starting to translate into visible local action.
The county announced the event June 24 and framed it as the flagship gathering of the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, the four-county pact created in 2009 by Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach counties. This year’s theme, “capitalizing on climate through innovation,” signals that county leaders want the summit to be more than a calendar stop and more than a discussion of long-term risk.
Broward said the meeting is designed to bring together business leaders, government officials, academics and nonprofits to discuss resilience strategies, climate mitigation and adaptation, along with the economic opportunities tied to planning for a hotter, wetter and more volatile future. That language matters in Broward, where residents are already living with the consequences of rising heat and repeated storm and flood threats, and where local decisions on drainage, roads, buildings and shoreline protection can affect daily life long before any summit ends.
Mayor Mark D. Bogen cast the county’s role as one of leadership in climate resilience, while also pointing to the Florida Panthers and Florida Atlantic University as partners that invest locally and support the community. The Panthers and FAU’s School of Environmental, Coastal, and Ocean Sustainability are signature sponsors, linking a professional sports franchise and a public university to a policy process that has to produce results far beyond a conference stage.
The real question for Broward residents is not whether the summit will draw experts to Fort Lauderdale. It is whether the county and its regional partners use the November gathering to push measurable action on the pressures people already feel in their neighborhoods, from flood-prone streets and aging infrastructure to the cost of staying insured in a more hazardous South Florida. If the summit works as intended, it should leave behind more than speeches: it should sharpen the county’s priorities and show which projects are moving from climate talk to county action.
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