Sustainability Communications

Many UK businesses breathed a sigh of relief when the EU scrapped its Green Claims Directive in June 2025. That relief was premature. Green claims compliance in 2026 is more demanding — with the ECGT enforcing from 27 September 2026 and CMA direct fining powers already live.

Product-level 'carbon neutral' claims based on offsetting are banned in the EU from September 2026, and the ASA has been ruling against them in the UK for two years. If this phrase appears on your packaging or advertising, here's what you need to do.

Sustainability is inherently complex. That’s not new, and it’s not going to change. You’re dealing with multiple topics, evolving standards, technical detail, and a constant stream of new expectations. It’s a lot to hold together. The problem is that this complexity often carries straight through into how companies communicate. You see it in long explanations, dense language, and messages that try to do too much at once. The intention is usually sound — to be accurate, comple

Most sustainability communications are built with external audiences in mind. Investors, customers, regulators, NGOs. A lot of effort goes into getting those messages right, from tone and positioning to the level of detail included. But there’s a quieter issue that often sits in the background, and it tends to get far less attention than it should. Whether the organisation itself is actually aligned on what’s being said. Even the most carefully written sustainability message

A third of UK businesses are deliberately communicating less about their sustainability efforts, scared of being accused of greenwashing. The problem: silence has its own set of risks. Here’s what greenhushing actually costs, and what to do instead.

Sustainability communications rarely suffer from a lack of input. If anything, the opposite is true. By the time a piece of content is ready to go out, it has often passed through multiple teams. Sustainability, legal, compliance, communications, leadership. Each one brings a different lens, a different concern, and a different threshold for risk. Individually, that makes complete sense. Collectively, though, it can create a very specific kind of problem: the message starts t

There’s no shortage of sustainability content right now. Reports, updates, commitments, dashboards, announcements. It’s constant, and in many cases, it’s well intentioned. But here’s the issue. More communication doesn’t automatically mean better communication. In sustainability, it often does the opposite. When the message isn’t clear, adding more of it just makes the confusion harder to ignore. The problem isn’t effort. If anything, most teams are doing more than ever. More

Credibility in sustainability communications is not about saying more, sounding greener, or publishing faster. In fact, some of the least credible sustainability messaging I see comes from organisations that are trying very hard to say all the right things. After more than 20 years in communications, and almost 15 working specifically in sustainability, I have learned this: trust is built through clarity, not confidence. And clarity often means being more precise, more honest

If there’s one word that comes up again and again in sustainability conversations, it’s trust. Brands want it. NGOs need it. Everyone worries about losing it. Audiences are increasingly sceptical of anything that sounds polished, overconfident, or too good to be true. What’s interesting is that most trust issues in sustainability communications don’t stem from outright dishonesty. They arise from a lack of clarity. Not because people are trying to mislead, but because sustain

Sustainability communications jobs have quietly become some of the most complex roles in organisations today. On paper, they often sound straightforward enough: communicate sustainability commitments, manage messaging, support campaigns, tell the story. But anyone actually working in sustainability communications knows the reality is far messier and more complicated. These roles now sit at the intersection of risk, trust, regulation, reputation, and expectation. And that shif

Sustainability communication can be a minefield; not because people don’t care, but because everyone feels the pressure to get it right. And when you’re a small team juggling a hundred other things, it’s easy to feel like you’re one sentence away from saying something wrong, sounding preachy, or attracting the "Actually…" brigade on LinkedIn. So we end up playing it safe. Or trying to sound more impressive than we are. Or staying quiet altogether. Here’s the thing: most susta