Rethinking the role of the sustainability communicator

The stakes of communicating sustainability are higher than ever as global companies enter a new era of ESG risk and opportunity. Getting it wrong may result in costly fines and lawsuits, while doing it right drives real business value. Yet many companies aren’t doing a great job when it comes to communicating sustainability — and greenwashing is on the rise. 

Greenwashing occurs more often out of ignorance rather than ill intent. That’s because the job of communicating sustainability typically falls to marketing and corporate communication teams with little sustainability expertise. And sustainability teams generally lack the communications and marketing savvy to ensure that the sustainability narrative is both accurate and interesting. 

A rapidly changing regulatory environment means companies no longer can take such a laissez-faire approach to communicating sustainability. A new breed of communication professional must emerge that can translate between sustainability and marketing departments to tell stories that are truthful, engaging and compliant.

This allows organizations to avoid greenwashing while engaging customers, investors, employees and other key stakeholders in a way which advances sustainability progress.   

Sustainability communications’ roots in crisis 

The earliest sustainability communicators were crisis communicators. Or, rather, crisis communicators assumed this role because the sustainability communication profession didn’t yet exist. 

In those days, when a company made a major mistake or got caught for some social or environmental impropriety, crisis communicators came in to spin the story and salvage corporate reputation. This made these communicators responsible for damage control more than conveying any kind of intentional corporate narrative on social and environmental activities. Many of the first sustainability reports were published in the wake of environmental disasters — a crisis communication effort.  

This legacy of reactivity lingers today with how many companies approach sustainability communication. Operating out of a place of discomfort, if not fear, of being criticized for social and environmental snafus, these organizations fail to form a proactive strategy for telling a transparent story of success and struggle.  

In many ways, modern sustainability communication and crisis communication are two sides of the same coin. When I worked at Edelman a few years back, my team sat across from the crisis communication team. The more companies invested in authentic sustainability action, the less need there was for crisis communication responses. 

But sustainability communication no longer can be a crisis exercise. It needs to become more.

Greenwashing’s legal and financial woes 

Recent regulatory developments mean that avoiding greenwashing now is more than just a moral imperative — it can save businesses significant legal and financial trouble. 

In Europe, the EU’s Green Claims Directive (GCD) regulates misleading environmental claims by imposing fines for companies that greenwash. Also coming out of the EU is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which requires companies to obtain third-party assurance on sustainability claims and quantify their environmental reporting. These rules will impact tens of thousands of companies across the globe — and most major private and public companies doing business in Europe. 

Meanwhile in California, the Climate Accountability Package requires all large companies doing business in the Golden State to publicly disclose their direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risks. And if the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ever gets its act together, we should be seeing similar rules rolling out across the United States in the coming years.

As if the regulators weren’t scary enough, litigators also have caught the scent of bad sustainability communicators. Recent years have seen an increase in class action lawsuits against organizations for alleged greenwashing. Companies such as Volkswagen, Samsung, Deutsche Bank and Delta Airlines all have found themselves in civil courts defending against accusations of making false environmental claims.

While sustainability communicators aren’t lawyers, they can help companies navigate the nuances of effective storytelling in a way which both avoids greenwashing and conveys an impactful narrative.  

The business opportunity of getting the story right

One of the greatest signs that sustainability has gone mainstream is the fact that sales departments now spend a great deal time thinking about it. It is becoming increasingly more common for questions about net zero, DEI and other environmental and social topics to appear in requests for proposals during B2B sales processes. Salesforce, for example, through its ‘Sustainability Exhibit’ requires suppliers to set science-based targets and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase sustainability disclosures and deliver carbon-neutral products and services as part of their contractual obligations to Salesforce.

As more major companies establish sustainability goals, they will need suppliers to help achieve them — meaning corporate sales decks must tell truthful sustainability stories that stick. A sustainability communicator can help companies develop authentic and engaging narratives tied to an organization’s corporate purpose ensuring that, if anything, organizations don’t get caught in an awkward position when a potential B2B company asks about a net zero strategy. 

How sustainability communicators help

Sustainability communicators either can be sustainability strategists who learned communication, or communication professionals who developed sustainability expertise. While one doesn’t have to be the number cruncher or the person setting science-based targets, they must be able to look at the numbers once they’ve been crunched and understand what they mean in order to translate them to different audiences. And they need to understand how sustainability strategy works from a systems level.

Sustainability communicators sits between the sustainability team, the marketing department and even the legal team. Their purpose is to ensure that the company has a comprehensive sustainability communication strategy and can identify storytelling opportunities that are both accurate and interesting. Sustainability communicators also work to avoid any disconnects between what a company says and what it does when it comes to sustainability progress.

And sometimes knowing what to say is as important as when to stay silent. While companies can’t afford to greenhush for long — either due to the opportunity cost of missed business deals or because it violates disclosure requirements — companies also don’t have to weigh in on every single social and environmental issue. Understanding what topics and stories are material to a business is one of the things sustainability communicators do best. 

We are entering a new era of transparency in sustainability storytelling. Companies must invest in sustainability communicators as a key role for protecting their brand and driving business value while spurring sustainability progress.