Sustainability communication has a credibility problem. For years, companies have made claims first and looked for evidence later. But audiences have now started to notice: Consumers are sceptical, employees are cynical, investors are asking harder questions, and regulators, from Brussels to national consumer authorities, are now writing that scepticism into law.

The question is no longer whether companies should communicate differently. It’s how.

The easy response is to go quiet. If every claim is a risk, make fewer claims. Remove the sustainability page, tone down the annual report, and let legal sign off on whatever remains.

This is greenhushing, and it’s as damaging as greenwashing. When the companies doing real work go quiet, the conversation is left to those with the least to lose. Customers lose the information they need to choose well. Peers lose examples of what’s possible. And the companies themselves lose the trust they’ve earned through real effort.

Silence isn’t caution, but another way of not telling the truth.

“Eco-friendly” was never the real problem. It was a symptom of a much bigger problem. Vague claims exist because vague strategies exist. If a company can’t say what it has improved, by how much and compared to what, the problem isn’t the marketing department. The underlying work hasn’t been done, or hasn’t been measured properly.

That’s why good sustainability communication starts long before anyone writes a word. It starts with a strategy clear enough to explain.

Specific claims are also better communication. “Sustainable coffee” says nothing. “We pay our farmers above the Fairtrade minimum and source most of our beans from shade-grown farms” says something a customer can remember, check and repeat.

Specific claims do three things vague ones can’t. One, they can be verified, so they build trust instead of draining it. Two, they show direction, so progress becomes the story rather than perfection. And, three, they make room for honesty about what isn’t solved yet, which, counterintuitively, is what makes people believe the rest.

Did you know?
In the EU, the Empowering Consumers Directive (EmpCo) has banned vague and unproven environmental claims since September 2026.

Much of what went wrong in sustainability communication grew out of carbon tunnel vision: one number, offset to zero, stamped on a label. “Carbon neutral” was attractive precisely because it turned a complex reality into a single tidy claim.

Nature doesn’t work that way. Climate is one process inside a much larger system that also includes water, soil, pollination and the species that hold it together. A company’s real footprint lives in that system, across its supply chains and the landscapes they touch, and it can’t be summed up in one word. The honest response isn’t a bigger claim but a clearer account: where you depend on nature, where you affect it, and what you’re doing about both.

That’s harder to fit on a label. It’s also the only story that will still hold up in five years.

Another source of distrust is inconsistency. The sustainability report says one thing, the advertising campaign another, the sales team a third. Each was written for a different audience, and none of them quite match.

Credible companies tell one story, at different levels of detail. The consumer sees a clear, specific message. The investor sees the data behind it. The employee understands how their work contributes. If a claim can’t survive being read by all three, it shouldn’t be made to any of them.

The shift we’d like to see is simple: treat every public claim as a commitment, not a slogan. If you say it, be ready to show the evidence, explain the method and report on progress next year.

Done that way, communication stops being the final step of a sustainability strategy and becomes part of how it’s governed. Claims drive data, data drives decisions, and the company that can explain clearly what it’s doing, including what it hasn’t figured out yet, will always beat the one hiding behind a green leaf.

Honest communication isn’t harder. It just has to be built on something real. That’s how trust is earned: not in what you claim, but in what you can show.