Sounding Certain About Sustainability is Becoming a Credibility Risk

There's a useful case study playing out across the corporate world right now, and most organisations aren't drawing the right lesson from it.

Over the past year or two, we've seen a significant number of companies revise, narrow, or quietly walk back the net zero commitments they made four or five years ago. Timelines have been extended. Scope 3 targets have been dropped or heavily qualified. The language has shifted from 'we will achieve' to 'we are working towards.' In some cases, the net zero framing has been abandoned altogether.

The instinct is to treat this as a failure of ambition, or of execution. In some cases it is. But in many, the more accurate diagnosis is a failure of communication; specifically, a failure that happened at the point the original commitments were made. The claims were written to sound certain in conditions that weren't.

The Pressure to Sound Resolved

There's a structural pull in sustainability communications towards projecting confidence. Stakeholders want clarity. Investors want targets they can hold to. Customers want commitments they can understand and repeat. And for anyone responsible for communications, ambiguity feels like weakness; something to tighten up, not acknowledge.

So the qualifiers disappear. 'Our current understanding suggests' becomes 'we will achieve.' 'We're working towards' becomes 'we're committed to.' The intention is to reassure. But it creates a fragility that doesn't show up until the underlying assumptions change, and in sustainability, they will change.

Emissions methodologies are still being developed and revised. Science on nature, biodiversity, and supply chain impact continues to evolve. Regulatory requirements shift. Technologies that looked viable sometimes aren't. Third-party data turns out to have gaps. None of this is unusual. Sustainability is a genuinely complex, rapidly evolving field. The problem isn't that the work is uncertain; it's that the communications often pretend it isn't.

What's Changed in the Room

Audiences have become considerably more sophisticated about sustainability over the past five years. They've watched commitments get made and then revised. They've read enough coverage of net zero target revisions to understand that 'ambitious' and 'achievable' are not the same thing. They're looking at methodology footnotes now. They're asking what's included in Scope 3, who verified the number, and what the contingencies are.

When communications sound too resolved — too polished, too complete, too certain — it no longer reads as confidence. Increasingly, it reads as a signal that something has been edited out. And audiences are getting better at identifying what that something might be.

This is particularly relevant for organisations that made bold sustainability commitments in 2019, 2020 or 2021. The communications landscape at that point was more forgiving. Bold claims were broadly welcomed, scrutiny was lower, and the language of ambition was taken largely at face value. That's not the situation now. The same language that sounded credible then can sound evasive today; not because the underlying work has deteriorated, but because expectations around transparency have raised the bar.

What Good Looks Like

The organisations managing this well haven't abandoned ambition. They've changed how they communicate it.

They make firm commitments where the evidence genuinely supports them. But they also acknowledge where the picture is still developing. They explain what they know, what they're working through, and what remains uncertain; and they treat their audience as capable of handling that complexity, rather than as a stakeholder group to be managed with simple answers.

Practically, this means being specific about what's included and what isn't. It means explaining the methodology rather than just the conclusion. It means flagging dependencies — 'this target assumes third-party verification standards that are still being finalised' — rather than burying them. It means building communications that can evolve as the work evolves, rather than communications that have to be quietly revised when reality catches up.

There's also a commercial argument here. Communications built around absolute certainty are much harder to adapt when conditions change, and they will change. Organisations that have locked themselves into highly specific, definitively-worded commitments often find those commitments becoming liabilities: things to manage and explain rather than foundations to build on. More grounded messaging tends to age better.

The Internal Dimension

This applies inside organisations as much as outside them.

There's often a significant gap between how sustainability work is described in external communications and how it's experienced by the people doing it. Internally, teams know where the uncertainties are. They know which targets are stretching, which dependencies haven't been resolved, and which assumptions are optimistic. Externally, that complexity can disappear behind polished, confident messaging.

Over time, that gap is corrosive. Teams become reluctant to raise complications because the external narrative leaves no room for them. And eventually, the gap between what's being said and what's being experienced becomes a communications problem of its own; usually at the worst possible moment.

The Shift That's Already Happened

The shift in what credibility looks like is real, and it's moving faster than many organisations have adjusted to.

Saying 'we don't have all the answers yet' used to feel like a communications risk. In sustainability, it's increasingly the condition for being taken seriously. Not because audiences expect perfection; they've learned that perfection is usually a sign that something has been simplified past the point of usefulness. But because the organisations that are doing this work seriously are the ones willing to show their working, acknowledge the hard parts, and be honest about the limits of what they currently know.

The strongest sustainability communications make clear commitments, communicate direction with confidence, and leave room for the honest answer: this is where we're heading, this is what we know, and this is the part we're still working through. That's not hedging. That's what trust looks like now.