2026 Must Be the Year of Courageous Sustainability Communication

This post originally appeared in Mike Hower’s Substack, The Sustainability Story, on January 5, 2026. Read it and subscribe here.

Corporate sustainability is stuck in a fear spiral.

Thanks for reading The Sustainability Story! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

As we head into 2026, companies are still slogging through what John Elkington dubbed the “sustainability recession”—a prolonged period of corporate retreat on sustainability commitments and, more noticeably, sustainability communication. CSOs have been sidelined, budgets cut, and targets quietly softened or eliminated. And even companies that continue doing the work are doing so more quietly. Greenhushing has become the default setting for many sustainability communication strategies.

This downturn didn’t start with Donald Trump’s reelection, but his return to the White House in January 2025 undeniably accelerated it. Companies that once felt emboldened to speak publicly about climate action, diversity, or social impact suddenly recalibrated. Legal risk loomed larger, and political backlash became stronger. By the end of 2025, many companies had concluded that silence was the safest option.

But silence isn’t a viable long-term strategy. If 2025 was corporate sustainability’s “Year of Fear,” then 2026 needs to be the “Year of Courage” when we break the spiral and get back on track.

Fear spirals during downturns aren’t new. In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt warned that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He recognized that "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror" was paralyzing the United States’ ability to “convert retreat into advance.” Fear itself was creating a psychological spiral that had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Corporate sustainability is facing a similar moment where a fear spiral is stifling our ability to “convert retreat into advance.” Granted, the fear companies face today isn't nameless, and it's not entirely unreasoning, either. Companies risk real legal, financial, and political consequences in crossing a vindictive, petty, and litigious White House.

But fearful silence comes with its own risks. By acquiescing to the loudest and most volatile stakeholder—a U.S. president elected to a four-year term—companies are failing their more permanent stakeholders. Investors, B2B customers, consumers, employees, communities, and other stakeholders continue to expect companies to provide evidence of progress on material sustainability issues.

Staying quiet might help organizations avoid scrutiny in the short term. It might even allow them to continue some work under the radar. But if no one is communicating why sustainability matters, how progress is being made, and where challenges remain, they’re ceding the narrative to the very forces trying to dismantle it.

And sustainability strategy doesn’t fully function in silence. Communication helps builds internal alignment, sustain stakeholder support, and deliver the business value that justifies continued effort and investment. Without it, even the best sustainability strategy eventually withers.

Breaking this corporate sustainability fear spiral requires recognizing that what’s at stake is more important than fear. And the sustainability challenges afflicting businesses around the world don’t disappear just because politicians acting in bad faith refuse to accept objective reality.

If 2026 is going to be different, companies must move beyond reactive silence and toward more proactively courageous sustainability communication—one grounded in practical strategy as well as conviction.

Here are five ways companies can be more courageous with their sustainability communication in 2026:

1. Create—or refine—your communication strategy

Courage doesn’t mean cowboying, cowgirling, or cowpersoning your sustainability communication. Acting on impulse is just as reactive—and often just as risky—as cowering in silence. Neither approach builds stakeholder trust, and neither holds up well once legal or regulatory scrutiny enters the picture.

Courageous communication must be calculated. That doesn’t make it phony or opportunistic. It means doing the work upfront to understand which sustainability issues actually matter for your business, where you have demonstrated performance, and how those stories connect to the decisions your stakeholders care about.

A sustainability communication strategy clarifies what your organization stands for, which issues actually matter to your business, who you need to reach, and how you’ll show up consistently—even when the storytelling environment gets hostile. It’s what allows you to communicate proactively rather than defensively.

Many companies don’t have this. And many communications teams haven’t been given the time, mandate, or expertise to build it. But without a strategy, silence becomes the default response to uncertainty.

If you already have a sustainability communication strategy, now is the time to revisit it—just as you would periodically update a materiality assessment. Political conditions shift, and stakeholder expectations evolve. Your strategy should be built to meet that reality.

2. Unite sustainability, communications, and legal teams

Meek sustainability messaging often manifests from internal dysfunction.

When sustainability, communications, and legal teams operate in silos—as they often do—conflicting incentives quietly shape what gets said, how it gets said, or whether anything gets said at all. At best, that misalignment produces weak, forgettable storytelling that raises greenwashing risk. At worst, it pushes companies toward sterile messaging or outright greenhushing in the name of safety.

Each function is solving for a legitimate concern. Sustainability teams are focused on credibility—technical accuracy, data integrity, and whether claims can be substantiated. Communications teams are focused on whether a story will actually land—whether it resonates, engages, and moves people. Legal teams are focused on compliance—minimizing regulatory, litigation, and disclosure risk.

None of these priorities are wrong. The problem is when organizations treat them as competing rather than interdependent considerations.

And all of them are shaped by context: cultural considerations, your industry’s reputation, and your company’s own track record on sustainability. What might be received as credible and compelling in one context can be seen as risky or tone-deaf in another.

Together, these forces form what I call the Four C’s of Effective Sustainability Storytelling: compelling, credible, compliant, and context. This framework sits at the core of my forthcoming book, Sustainability Storytelling (Kogan Page, May 2026).

Proactively building trust and rapport across these teams—before the next crisis strikes—creates the conditions for courage. If you want to go further, involve government affairs to ensure your political spending and trade association memberships don’t contradict your public commitments.

Courage, in this context, isn’t always about saying more. It’s about aligning internally so that when you do speak, you can do so with clarity and conviction.

3. Back off the buzzwords

You don’t need me to remind you that sustainability has a buzzword problem. From ESG and DEI to impact and even sustainability itself, we love our buzzwords—extra credit if it’s an acronym.

This isn’t just jargon for jargon’s sake. Buzzwords help address a real problem: salience. They simplify complex sustainability issues into concepts people can recognize quickly and place into a mental bucket. That matters when communicating to diverse audiences with varying levels of sustainability interest and knowledge.

But leaning on buzzwords too heavily creates two problems:

• First, buzzwords crowd out substance. In my experience, companies that overly rely on jargon often struggle to demonstrate actual performance on sustainability issues. If you can’t describe your sustainability work without resorting to buzzwords, it’s worth pausing to ask whether there’s enough happening on the ground to justify the story you’re telling.

• Second, buzzwords make an easy target. The same shorthand that helps people quickly grasp sustainability topics gives critics a convenient caricature to attack. Without specifics, even well-intentioned claims invite skepticism—if not criticism.

In 2026, companies need to be more disciplined about how they deploy buzzwords. I recommend using them sparingly, leading with specifics, and starting with what your strategy is actually delivering—or where it’s falling short. Saying a company is “committed to environmental stewardship” doesn’t carry much weight without evidence behind it. On contentious topics like DEI, results matter far more than rhetoric: pay equity data, retention trends, promotion rates, supplier spending. If a skeptic can poke holes in a claim, that’s usually a sign more proof is needed.

There’s an important caveat here. Cutting buzzwords entirely can create its own risks. After the Trump Administration blacklisted hundreds of words—including diversity, inclusive, climate crisis, and social justice, among others—many companies quietly scrubbed language from websites, sustainability reports, and financial filings. A Financial Times investigation found Walmart dropped statements calling climate change “one of the greatest challenges of our time,” Meta removed claims of climate leadership, and Kraft Heinz softened its net zero language. An analysis by NPR found companies including Disney, Google, GM, PepsiCo, Intel, and PayPal deleted references to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from investor reports. Doing this certainly didn’t earn these companies credibility points.

You don’t need to say “sustainability” to talk about sustainability. You don’t need to say “diversity” to talk about diversity. But words carry symbolic weight—and cutting them cavalierly doesn’t make you look very courageous or credible in the eyes of your stakeholders.

4. Define what ‘courageous sustainability communication’ means for your organization

Courageous sustainability communication doesn’t require your CEO to grab a megaphone at a political rally (though, in my book, that would be awesome). Conviction can be signaled through a wide spectrum of valorous acts—and right now, the bar is lower than it’s been in years.

With so many organizations pulling back, consistency alone has become a form of courage. If your company was vocal about sustainability during what I’ve called the “ESG Golden Age”—the surge of corporate sustainability enthusiasm between roughly 2020 and 2023—the current downturn shouldn’t change what matters. If climate risk threatened your supply chain in 2022, it probably still does in 2026. If diversity was central to innovation and talent retention five years ago, it likely still is today. The business realities haven’t shifted, but the noise around them has.

Now, if what you were communicating previously wasn’t business-relevant, that’s a different story.

It’s no secret that many companies got swept up in the ESG Golden Age’s hoopla, feeling pressure to comment on every social and environmental issue—even when those issues weren’t material to their business, or if they had no tangible progress to speak of. In some cases, the pullback reflects a necessary reset rather than fear.

This is where a more structured approach helps. A Sustainability Storytelling Assessment—the process I’ve developed and outline in my book—helps companies to identify, analyze, and prioritize their sustainability stories based on both opportunity for impact and exposure to risk. Done well, it gives you a clearer sense of when it makes sense to speak up, when it’s better to stay quiet, and how to do either without defaulting to greenhushing.

Courageous communication isn’t about commenting on every social and environmental issue. It’s about knowing what you stand for, understanding why it matters to your business, and actually standing for it when it counts.

As Nelson Mandela wrote in Long Walk to Freedom, courage isn’t the absence of fear—it’s the triumph over it. For companies, that triumph shows up in following through on sustainability commitments—and being willing to talk about it openly.

If you’ve made commitments, keep them, and let the world know about it. If you’ve told stakeholders what matters, act like it still does—even when it’s inconvenient. That’s how you build trust during cynical times. And that’s what courage looks like in practice.

5. Get real

Knowing what you stand for is one thing. Operating within a system that doesn’t always reward it is another.

Like many people in this field, idealism is what pulled me into sustainability work in the first place. I looked at the world as it is and believed business could—and had to—do better, because the status quo clearly isn’t working. When you step back and look at what’s at stake, none of this feels optional. As former Interface CEO Ray Anderson once asked, “What’s the business case for ending life on Earth?”

But idealism alone doesn’t carry much weight inside most organizations.

We’re operating in a business environment that still prioritizes short-term financial performance over long-term resilience. That didn’t start yesterday, and it won’t disappear overnight. Until the legal, political, and market incentives change, sustainability leaders and communicators have to work within that reality—not pretend it doesn’t exist.

“Getting real” doesn’t mean abandoning core values. It means understanding the business as well as, if not better than, the people who are skeptical of this work. It means being able to explain sustainability in terms of risk exposure, cost volatility, operational continuity, talent retention, and growth—not just ideals or ethics.

Influence flows from credibility. And credibility comes from demonstrating that sustainability isn’t in tension with business fundamentals—but increasingly central to them.

If you want to change the system, you first have to navigate the one you’re in. That requires pragmatism, patience, and good judgment—alongside conviction. That’s the kind of courage this moment demands.

Breaking the spiral

The sustainability recession has lasted longer than many people expected. It won’t continue forever—but it has already changed how companies weigh risk, decide when to be visible, and think about whether speaking up is worth it.

But a company’s narrative must remain constant through the booms and busts of corporate sustainability. A company that frantically revises or redacts its sustainability story out of fear can’t expect stakeholders to trust its word.

The political winds will shift again, as they always do. The companies that make it through this sustainability recession with their credibility intact will be the ones who find the courage to continue to speak out on the issues that matter to their business. They’ll have aligned their sustainability, communications, and legal teams around messaging that’s compelling, credible, compliant—and grounded in context. They’ll be specific about what they’re doing, honest about what they’re not, and consistent even when the political landscape makes that uncomfortable.

Let’s make 2026 the year we finally break the fear spiral. Stop reacting out of fear and start leading with courage and conviction. Define your narrative. Align your teams. Back your words with evidence and your commitments with action. Do all of this while “keeping it real” today even as you work toward that better tomorrow.

Whatever happens, I’ll be here to help guide you.