Ep. 1: Rethinking the role of sustainability communicators

The stakes of communicating sustainability are higher than ever as global companies enter a new era of ESG risk and opportunity. In this inaugural episode of The Sustainability Communicator, Mike discusses how the increased risks and rewards of bad and good sustainability communication, respectively, are calling for a new type of sustainability communications professional capable of translating between marketing and sustainability departments.

Read the full transcript of the conversation below. You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and YouTube.

TRANSCRIPT

With greenwashing on the rise and the stakes of sustainability storytelling higher than ever, is it time to rethink the role of the sustainability communicator?​     

Hey everybody, and welcome to the sustainability communicator — the podcast, exploring the intersection of corporate sustainability and storytelling. I'm your host, Mike Hower, a sustainability communication nerd with more than 15 years of experience on both sides of the podium — as a journalist for media outlets like GreenBiz and a communication strategist for major global companies — during each episode, we explore interesting sustainability communication, challenges, risks, and opportunities facing folks in the business community and beyond. If you're ready to talk your walk, then you've come to the right place. Time to get to it.     

Since we're just getting to know each other, I figured it'd be good for me to start out telling you a little bit more about my journey as a sustainability communicator. I graduated during the Great Recession in 2009 — a great time to graduate, of course — and I found myself not really sure what I wanted to do with my life. I knew that I liked writing and I liked talking and that I was good at that. And I found a job at a marketing and PR agency in San Francisco working with some clean tech clients. And that was the first time I really saw that it was possible to both make a living and make a difference.

After doing that for a little over a year and a half, I still felt like there was something missing and that I needed to go out and see the world and really figure out what I wanted to do with my life. So, I found a program that allowed me to volunteer in Bogotá, Colombia for a year, teaching English as part of a IBM grant to use technology to uplevel and upskill kids in at-risk neighborhoods to help them improve their English — among other skills. I usually tell people it was the greatest, best and worst year of my life because it was really hard and it definitely put me outside my comfort zone as far as experiencing the world firsthand — and throughout that year, I really saw the intersection of social and environmental justice for the first time. Particularly during a visit to the San Blas archipelago in Panama — which is just off the coast of the Caribbean side. 

And I got to visit a Guna village — which is an indigenous peoples that has been living there for hundreds of years — and they live on these tiny, beautiful islands that are basically at sea level. And I learned then that because of rising sea levels they were going to have to relocate soon to the mainland. And this was back in 2011, when the climate crisis wasn't really seen as a crisis yet. Even those of us who believed in climate change still saw it as something that was going to happen way in the future. And this was the first time I saw that this is something that's happening now. It's a clear and present danger. And I knew that I needed to devote my career and my life to doing whatever I can to address it. 

And so I came back and discovered Sustainable Brands and worked with them for a while to help them promote their conference that they have in San Diego. And that conference was the first time I really saw corporate sustainability as a career option. And, I fell in love and that's where I've been  focusing my efforts ever since.  And so over the years, I've worked as a writer for Sustainable Brands, GreenBiz and a couple other publications. I also did a stint in DC for grad school where I studied climate communications. And then I also worked as a sustainability strategist at big agencies like Edelman, where I was working with some major brands like The North Face, HP and some others on a sustainability communication strategy and execution. I also worked in-house at a small climate tech company for a while helping out with communications there. And, most recently I was at a small ESG agency, doing a lot of ESG reporting among other things.  

Almost a year ago, I left to start my own business Hower Impact. I am a fractional sustainability communications executive, where I embed with companies of all sizes — mostly large companies — to help them fill gaps of sustainability communications expertise. And this is something that I've really seen as a growing need over the past few years in particular. Companies have this disconnect between the sustainability strategists and their communication strategists because they live in different departments and they often don't speak the same language. 

So as somebody with a background on both sides of that — someone like me can come in and translate between the two. And that's something that I want to talk about today as companies face a complicated regulatory landscape and changing stakeholder expectations. It's not easy to communicate sustainability and the stakes are high because — back in the day, you could get away with maybe saying a few things about your standability program without backing it up — but today, that's not the case. You might get caught for greenwashing, which can lead to major fines. You also could get sued in civil court, which is also not cheap. And so, these days just allowing companies to silo their communication efforts and have generalist communicators  responsible for communicating sustainability is not going to work anymore — or if they do, it's going to be a very expensive risk. 

So, that's another topic I wanted to cover today — how can companies avoid greenwashing. And often I see this in my own experience — companies aren't usually intentionally trying to greenwash — nobody wants to lie and that's not really the goal. Often it's out of ignorance rather than ill intent — it's because companies are relying on folks who might be excellent., marketing people, and they might be great at communications, but they don't understand sustainability subject matter — which unless you're focused on it all the time, it's pretty much impossible to. So, the days of just having people who are just kind of picking up sustainability comms as a side hustle — you can't do that. You're going to need to start having people, whether in-house or consultants like me, come in and really be the experts who can speak the languages of both the sustainability teams and the communications teams.  

Before we get any further, I want to talk a little bit more about sustainability communication as a profession and how it's evolved over the years. So, the earliest days of sustainability communication were actually rooted in crisis communication. Or rather crisis communication assumed this role because sustainability communication didn't really exist yet as a profession. So in those days, when a company made a major mistake or got caught for some social environmental impropriety, crisis communicators — as they still will come in today to do this — came in to spin the story and salvage corporate reputation. So, this made communicators more responsible for damage control than conveying any kind of intentional corporate narrative on social, environmental progress. And, in fact, many of the first sustainability reports were published in the wake of a major environmental disaster. So it was actually a crisis communication effort. 

So this legacy of reactivity lingers today with how many companies approach sustainability communication. You know, operating often out of a place of discomfort, if not fear of being criticized for social environmental snafus, these organizations often fail to form a proactive strategy about what they're actually doing is tied to their corporate purpose. 

In many ways, modern sustainability communication and crisis communication are two sides of the same coin. Back when I worked at Edelman, I actually sat back to back with our crisis communications team. And it was often thought that the more companies invested in sustainability and the communications around it. You know, maybe the less crisis they would have to communicate later.  So, the more you invest in sustainability and actually doing the right thing, the less likely you're going to make mistakes and have to call in the crisis team later. 

So everybody's getting more familiar with the regulatory developments coming out of Europe and in California. It's no longer just a moral imperative to avoid greenwashing — it can save businesses major legal and financial trouble. And in Europe, we've got the Green Claims Directive, which regulates misleading environmental claims by imposing fines for companies that greenwash. And also coming out of the EU is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive — or CSRD — which requires companies to obtain third party assurance on sustainability claims and to quantify their environmental reporting. These rules will impact tens of thousands of companies across the globe. And not just European ones — any company operating anywhere that does business in Europe over a certain threshold is going to have to do this. And this applies to major private and public companies as well. And, meanwhile, in California the Climate Accountability Package is requiring all major companies doing business in the Golden State to publicly disclose their direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and climate related risks. And if the SEC in the U.S. finally gets its act together, we'll probably be seeing similar rules rolling out across the United States in the coming years.  

But regulators aren't the only boogeymen here. Litigators also have caught the scent of bad sustainability communicators. In recent years, we've seen a huge increase in class action lawsuits against organizations for alleged greenwashing and companies such as Volkswagen, Samsung, Deutsche Bank and Delta Airlines all found themselves in civil courts, defending against accusations of making false environmental claims. 

And a while sustainability communicators like myself aren't lawyers — although I did entertain the idea back in college — they can help companies navigate the nuances of effective storytelling in a way which both avoids greenwashing and conveys an impactful narrative. So, where lawyers will  help you manage the risk and maybe help shape the communications to avoid getting sued or fined, oftentimes they will overstep and kind of water down the story so there's nothing interesting to tell — or they'll just tell you to “greenhush” and say nothing. And so where a sustainability communicator plays into this is, we can work with your legal team and your comms team and your sustainability team to make sure that you're telling the most interesting and honest stories in a way which avoids all these legal threats and regulatory threats. 

One of the greatest signs that sustainability has gone mainstream is the fact that sales teams actually now care about it — and they spend a lot of time thinking about it because it's becoming increasingly more common for questions about net zero, DEI, waste and other issues  to show up in the B2B sales process. Many RFPs now will actually ask: “does the company have a net zero goal or strategy?” And if you don't have one, you're probably not going to win the business. 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. 

And as more major companies establish sustainability goals, they're going to need suppliers to help achieve them — meaning corporate sales decks must tell sustainability stories that stick. The sustainability communicator can help companies develop authentic, 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 or anything related to ESG.

Sustainability communicators either can be sustainability strategists — more of the technical folk who learned communication skills — or communication professionals who developed sustainability expertise. To succeed as a sustainability communicator, you don't have to be a number cruncher or the person setting the strategy or science-based targets, for example, but you have to be able to look at the numbers once they've been crunched and  look at the strategy from a high level and understand it so that you can translate it to different audiences. And it really requires a strong, systems-level knowledge of sustainability and how everything interacts and interoperates. 

Now in a perfect world, a sustainability communicator would sit between the sustainability team, the marketing department and the legal team. And the 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 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 knowing when to stay silent — you don't have to be talking about every single social environmental issue. You really have to understand what's material to your business and then inform your sustainability communication strategy around that. 

As we move into 2024, we're entering a new era of transparency and sustainability storytelling.  Companies can't sit on the sidelines any longer. They're going to have to talk more about what they're doing and if they're not doing anything, they're going to have to start doing something. So they have a story to tell. The days of greenwashing are coming to a close because it's just going to get too expensive to keep doing it

And with that, we've reached the end of the inaugural episode of the sustainability communicator podcast.  Time really does fly when you're having fun. Doesn't it? Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you like what you heard and like to hear more, stay tuned for future episodes that cover topics such as “why communicating climate change is so difficult”,  “Why your sustainability story sucks and why there's hope for you yet”, “Why your ESG report isn't enough when it comes to communicating sustainability”, and some ESG communications trends for 2024. 

Wherever you are in your sustainability journey. Good luck. And keep at it. We need you out there.