Why sustainability communication keeps failing. And what trust has to do with it.

Sustainability communication has become one of the most scrutinised areas of corporate messaging. Regulators are increasing enforcement around environmental claims, investors are demanding clearer disclosures, and audiences are quicker than ever to challenge messaging that doesn’t match reality.

Over the past year I’ve been writing about greenwashing, regulation and trust. Looking back at those posts now, they tell a story about how the conversation around sustainability communication is changing.

About a year ago I asked a question on LinkedIn: Is this greenwashing?

Australian regulators had issued more than $55 million in penalties for misleading environmental and social claims. The ACCC had flagged 57% of companies it reviewed for questionable environmental claims. ASIC had taken legal action against major funds over "net zero" and "ethical" investment messaging.

Organisations followed their instincts and checked their messaging. They audited their claims and asked comms teams to tighten the language.

The problem is that compliance becomes the strategy for credibility. Focusing only on messaging treats the symptom, not the underlying issue.

There is still a gap between getting the message right and being trustworthy.

Before any sustainability communications go live, the questions worth asking aren't about tone or reach.

• Can this be verified with documented evidence?

• Is the language precise enough to defend to a regulator, or does it rely on vague terms like "eco-friendly" or "carbon neutral" that won't hold up?

• Would you be comfortable with a journalist quoting this tomorrow?

  
  

If the answer isn’t confident, the message needs more substance. Communications and marketing can’t happen in isolation. Messaging needs to be created with input from legal, compliance and operations. Otherwise there's too much incentive to stretch the claim.

Why messaging alone isn’t enough

There are some organisations responding to the regulatory environment that have moved beyond compliance.

They’re combining hard data with human stories, giving statistics a reason to matter to real people. They get their employees involved and engage communities and sometimes critics in shaping strategy rather than just the message.

It’s better to build systems for transparency before scrutiny instead of in response to it. But it's still advocacy.

Advocacy done well, with evidence, with stakeholder voices, with honest progress reporting is far better than advocacy done badly.

But it’s still a measure of how organisations appear, rather than how they’re doing.

Because audiences are good at detecting when reality doesn't match the external narrative.

And the more sophisticated the communications were, the worse the credibility damage becomes.

Trust isn’t about constructed storytelling; it's about intentionally sharing the things that are working and the things that still need work.

A sustainability update that says "we've reduced emissions by 18% against a 40% target, and here are the areas where we're still working through it" is more credible than "we're committed to a sustainable future." One is verifiable. The other is positioning.

The most effective practitioners are at the table planning communications with executive teams. They’ve shown leadership that communications isn’t an afterthought but an integral part of the organisation.

The cost of losing trust

This is where the conversation became uncomfortable. My post on trust highlights one of the most strategic roles communications professionals can play.

Greenwashing is usually framed as a compliance problem. The fines are real and they're increasing. Volkswagen's emissions scandal cost more than €30 billion in fines and settlements and triggered the company's first annual loss in decades. EnergyAustralia paid $12.5 million in penalties for misleading carbon neutral claims after environmental claims became an enforcement priority for the ACCC. Those are significant, documented costs.

But they're not the whole cost. And they might not even be the largest part of it.

Trust affects pricing power. It affects talent stability, customer retention and cost of capital. When you mislead people, you lose credibility and the financial impacts move through the business in ways that are nearly impossible to itemise.

When a controversy goes global within hours, as we've seen happen repeatedly, the direct costs are real and include legal, advisory and governance time. The indirect costs are harder to measure but likely much larger. Distraction, delayed strategy and leadership instability can takes years to repair.

This is where communications is usually undersold.

It’s not a brand function or messaging function, but a governance function. One that protects credibility before it's tested, not after it's lost.

That means being the voice in the room that pushes for the right call. Before questions become headlines or fines.

Communications professionals need to stop presenting sustainability communication to leadership in the context of brand or reputation and start presenting it as a risk and capital question.

Boards and CEOs respond to a credibility gap that affects cost of capital, talent retention and regulatory exposure. They respond far less to “we need to tell this story better”.

Both might be true but framing it in their language gets a different level of attention.

The other practical implication is preparation. If an environmental claim became a front-page story tomorrow, the organisation should already have a response, with data and key messages. The documentation should be accessible and the team ready to go.

Reactive communications are always more expensive, and planning strategically is a governance not communications priority.

Sustainability communication can build trust

Sustainability commitment often starts with compliance. A reporting requirement. An investor expectation. A regulatory obligation. That's fine. It's honest. You start because you have to.

But when leadership teams starts making decisions that reflect the commitment, not just in external communications, people inside the organisation notice. It’s how resources are allocated, what gets prioritised when there's a trade-off, how teams are treated and what conversations happen internally. Belief grows. Culture changes incrementally, in ways that aren't announced and can't be manufactured.

And when culture changes, the external story changes with it. Not because someone wrote a better brief. Because the organisation actually became something worth saying.

That's the difference between a sustainability narrative that holds up and one that eventually doesn't. It's not about the quality of the communications. It's about whether the people inside the organisation believe what they're being asked to say.

Because if they don't, inconsistencies show up. It’s what is said under pressure, how employees talk about the company and in the stories that emerge when something goes wrong, sometimes to fill the gaps when no comment has been provided.

The organisations building genuine credibility aren't the ones with the most sophisticated communications strategies. They're the ones where employees, at various levels, actually believe the work they're doing matters. Where sustainability isn't something that happens in the ESG function and gets handed to marketing — it's something that shows up in decisions at every level.

That doesn't happen because of a communications campaign. It happens because of consistent leadership behaviour over time. It happens when internal conversations are as honest as external ones. It happens when the gap between what the organisation says and what it does is being actively, visibly closed rather than managed.

For communications professionals, the most valuable question you can ask before any sustainability campaign isn't how should we tell this story? It's do our people believe this story?

If the answer is no — or not yet — then the most strategic thing you can do is say so. Help leadership understand what the gap is and why it matters. Slow the external narrative down until the internal reality can support it.

That's not limiting your role. It's the point where your role becomes genuinely strategic rather than executional.

How Communications Professionals Can Lead the Conversation

Pull back and look at the arc here. Compliance is about protection. Communication builds credibility. The organisations that will be in the strongest position over the next decade are the ones that attract talent, maintain investor confidence, lead industry conversations and recover well when things go wrong. They know trust is should be treated as a capital asset, not a communications outcome.

That's not built through messaging. It's built through governance. Through decisions made consistently over time, visible to the people inside the organisation before they're visible to anyone outside it. Through a culture that believes in what it's doing, even when no one's watching.

That's the shift worth making. And it starts not with a campaign brief, but with an honest conversation about where the organisation actually is.

Is that strategic layer missing in your organisation?

If that strategic layer — connecting communication, governance and credibility — is what's missing in your organisation, that's the work I do.

I work with leadership teams as a fractional communications adviser, identifying where the real credibility gaps are and helping close them before they become costly.

Not campaign management. Not social content. The strategic layer that makes the rest of it worth doing. If that's a conversation worth having, I'd welcome it.