Communication & Arts
The most revealing thing about how organisations talk about sustainability is the word "initiative." An initiative is something you launch, resource for a while, congratulate yourself on, and quietly retire when priorities shift. It sits alongside other initiatives, competing for attention and budget. The moment sustainability is framed this way, as one project among many, an organisation has already told itself that this isn’t any more important than anything else. And it is. This is the planet we live on, the place our children will live when we leave – it isn’t trialling standup desks or a brand partnership.
For those of us in communications, this is not a peripheral concern. Communication is sometimes seen as the packaging around a strategy - but it is actually where the value of a strategy is decided and it's sincerity (or lack thereof) becomes exposed. So, the question I am posing here is one that crosses every business school discipline and every part of an organisation: how can we create long term value for people and make a profit that doesn’t cost the earth? And how do we embed sustainability rather than treating it as just another temporary initiative.
The honesty problem
Let me start with something that can be quite uncomfortable. Most of the anxiety around sustainability communication comes from an unspoken tension: the people writing these messages often privately believe things are getting worse, while the messages themselves are relentlessly upbeat. Emissions continue to rise. Biodiversity continues to collapse. The gap between what climate science demands and what economies are delivering is not narrowing and if we are honest when we talk about, the discussion can be bleak.
Pretending otherwise produces a particular kind of communication that audiences have learned to distrust, glossy, aspirational taglines and photos of wind turbines that have nothing to do with the organisation itself. Greenwashing is not usually a lie in the basic sense, it is more of a wild exaggeration of a small, good thing, communicated as though it were large.
The instinct in response is either cynicism or forced optimism. I want to argue for another way – honest constructiveness. People are complex enough to hold two things at once. Yes, the trajectory of planetary change is alarming, but yes, meaningful action is possible and worth doing well. Despair and denial are actually the same move; both are ways of choosing not to act. Communicating well means refusing that move on your audience's behalf.
Value, and who counts as a stakeholder
Here I want to be careful, because I am about to sneak in an idea that some people will find really natural and others will find quietly radical, so let me say it plainly rather than dress it up. The dominant framework in most business education treats the firm's obligations as running primarily to its shareholders, with everything else (workers, communities, the environment) as a constraint to be managed and minimised. The "triple bottom line" of people, profit, and planet was an attempt to widen that lens. But seriously – profit was still the real bottom line.
A more serious position, and one with a long intellectual lineage, is that value is created collectively and ought to be accounted for collectively. The worker who builds the product, the community that hosts the factory, the ecosystem that absorbs the waste, these are not externalities to the value equation. They are participants in it. When we speak of "long-term value for people, profit, and the planet," the interesting move is to stop ranking those three and start asking what it would mean to treat them as genuinely co-equal. We may even need to prioritise the planet if we want to keep living on it.
From initiative to identity
So, what does it look like when sustainability stops being an initiative? The shift is from something an organisation does to something an organisation is, and communication is how you can tell the difference.
An initiative generates announcements. An identity generates consistency. If sustainability is genuinely constitutive of an organisation, you see it even in all the boring places: in how procurement decisions are justified, in what gets measured in the quarterly review, in whether your bonus survives a decision that was good for the planet and merely acceptable for the quarter.
For communicators, this has a concrete and slightly deflating implication. The most important sustainability communication is internal, not external. It is the framing that shapes how a mid-level manager understands a trade-off at 4pm on a Tuesday. External communication that runs ahead of internal reality is precisely what audiences have been trained to detect and ignore. The credibility of the message to the outside world is downstream of whether the organisation actually believes it on the inside.
Here are a few principles worth holding onto:
- Specificity over aspiration. Make concrete claims that can be checked ("we reduced X by Y, verified by Z"). This builds trust that a hundred aspirational statements cannot.
- Proportion over selection. Communicate the whole picture, including what is not going well and what remains unsolved. Audiences forgive incompleteness far more readily than they forgive feeling like they are being managed.
- Constancy over campaign. The organisation that says less but says it consistently, in every context, is more believable than the one that says a lot during launch week.
Let’s go back to where we started for a minute, because I don't want to suggest you have to wallow in doom. The reason to be positive is not that things are fine. It is that hopelessness is self-defeating. The historical record is reasonably clear that large-scale change, when it comes, tends to arrive faster than expected. The relevant question for any organisation and communicator, is not whether the situation is dire, but whether you intend to be part of the response or part of the inertia. A communications discipline that can help organisations tell the truth about the stakes and remain capable of action is doing something genuinely valuable, in the fullest sense of that word.
References:
Centola, D., Becker, J., Brackbill, D., & Baronchelli, A. (2018). Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention. Science, 360(6393), 1116–1119. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aas8827
Global Carbon Project. (2025). Global carbon budget 2025. https://globalcarbonbudget.org/fossil-fuel-co2-emissions-hit-record-high-in-2025/
United Nations Environment Programme. (2025). Emissions gap report 2025: Off target — Continued collective inaction puts global temperature goal at risk. https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2025
Way, R., Ives, M. C., Mealy, P., & Farmer, J. D. (2022). Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition. Joule, 6(9), 2057–2082. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2022.08.009
World Wide Fund for Nature. (2024). Living planet report 2024: A system in peril. WWF. https://livingplanet.panda.org/
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