Credible: The Six Signs of Sustainability Substance
This post originally appeared on The Sustainability Story Substack. Subscribe here.
Shortly after BlackRock Chairman Larry Fink famously declared that “climate risk is investment risk” in January 2020, my inbox filled practically overnight with requests for sustainability reporting help.
Why? Fink’s message had signaled to investors that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) now mattered. This coalesced with the growing regulatory momentum for eventual mandatory disclosure. Suddenly, boards were asking for ESG information from executive teams who weren’t prepared to do so.
While by 2019, some 90 percent of the S&P 500 companies were publishing sustainability reports, the emails I was receiving were from the 10 percent that weren’t—and many mid-cap companies that hadn’t yet formalized sustainability programs.
When fielding these requests I’d ask a few simple questions:
What is your sustainability strategy?
Have you completed a materiality assessment?
What goals have you set and metrics do you have to share?
These questions were more often than not met with silence. Most of these companies had little to report—no goals, no strategy, sometimes not even a qualified sustainability lead.
My advice was always the same: slow down, build substance, measure progress, and only then communicate. Most didn’t listen.
Even the most compelling sustainability story eventually collapses if it’s built on a shaky foundation. When companies communicate before they’re ready, perception takes precedence over performance. They default to vague claims and buzzwords that damage credibility and invite exactly the greenwashing accusations they were trying to avoid.
That’s where the third of the Four C’s of Effective Sustainability Storytelling comes in. Last time we explored Compelling—how to make stakeholders care and act. But compelling communication only works when it’s built on something real. Credibility is what separates genuine sustainability leadership from corporate sustainability theater.
But sustainability communicators aren’t always equipped to flag if their organization’s sustainability story will hold up to scrutiny. Sitting between the more left-brained sustainability team and the more right-brained communications team, sustainability communicators often struggle to identify what makes a sustainability strategy credible—and worth communicating.
In my upcoming book, Sustainability Storytelling, I introduce what I call the Six Signs of Sustainability Substance—six markers that reveal whether your company’s work is credible and your stories can stand up to the test. Let’s explore each of these now.
1. Purpose Anchored
A credible sustainability strategy flows directly from a company’s reason for being. When sustainability is anchored in purpose rather than tacked on as an afterthought, it’s far more likely to endure political pressure, market volatility, and leadership change. When it isn’t, it tends to drift into box-checking.
Patagonia makes this easiest to see. When founder Yvon Chouinard restructured the company in 2022 to make Earth its only shareholder, this was the logical extension of a mission the company had held for decades. When Costco stood firm on DEI in 2025 while Walmart and Target scaled back, it was because diversity was explicitly tied to Costco’s code of ethics—not just its marketing. Purpose-anchored sustainability strategy is what gives sustainability stories their natural credibility.
2. Leadership Driven
Sustainability strategy stalls without genuine leadership commitment. When a CEO truly champions the cause, it cascades through the organization. When they don’t, sustainability gets relegated to the communications team and treated as a PR function rather than a business one.
Paul Polman’s decision to stop issuing quarterly guidance when he became Unilever’s CEO in 2009 sent a clear signal that the company would focus on long-term value, not short-term stock price. Ray Anderson’s “spear-in-the-chest moment” reading Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce led him to launch Interface’s Mission Zero—a total reimagining of how a carpet company could operate. Both leaders staked their credibility on sustainability as a business strategy, not a PR play. That’s what leadership driven actually looks like.
3. Materiality Based
Even the most committed companies can’t address every sustainability issue at once. Materiality simply means focusing on the issues that matter most—to your business and to your stakeholders. Companies that chase every trend or respond to every activist campaign end up with scattered, unconvincing stories. Companies that focus on material issues tell coherent ones that actually move the business forward.
Your materiality assessment—the process of engaging stakeholders and mapping which sustainability topics are most relevant to your business performance—should guide not just your strategy but your storytelling. If an issue isn’t material to your business, you probably shouldn’t be leading with it in your sustainability storytelling.
4. Business Integrated
Sustainability that lives in a silo, disconnected from how the business actually operates, does little to move the needle. True integration shows up in hundreds of small actions that add up: finance teams factoring climate risk into investment decisions, procurement including sustainability requirements in supplier contracts, product designers considering lifecycle impact from the start.
Mars is a good role model here. Its Net Zero Roadmap—which I had the privilege of helping create—commits $1 billion to reaching net zero by 2050. But what makes it credible isn’t the number. It’s that the plan is open-source, tied to the company’s Five Principles, and framed explicitly as business strategy rather than philanthropy. As CEO Poul Weihrauch put it: “Profit and purpose are not enemies.”
5. Metrics Backed
Communicating vague or half-hearted sustainability commitments is worse than admitting to having no commitment at all. They invite skepticism and scrutiny, greenwashing accusations, and erode the trust you’re trying to build. Data is what separates substance from spin.
Science-based targets, SMART goals with clear timelines and baselines, third-party verification—these are what make sustainability claims defensible. Without credible metrics, every claim risks becoming a liability.
As a sustainability communicator, if you’re being asked to announce goals without a measurement plan behind them, that’s your moment to push back.
6. Transparency Led
Transparency means sharing the good news with the bad. In fact, companies that only communicate wins are often less trusted than those that openly acknowledge setbacks. When PepsiCo missed some of its sustainability targets, its transparent response—explaining the barriers and presenting a credible path forward—earned what my sources at the company have described as an overwhelmingly positive reaction from stakeholders.
According to the DCA-Transparency framework, effective transparency operates across five dimensions: disclosure, clarity, accuracy, timeliness, and relevance. Disclosure means sharing the full picture, wins and setbacks alike. Clarity means translating technical language into plain English. Accuracy means backing claims with verifiable data. Timeliness means reporting when stakeholders need the information, not months later. And relevance means tailoring what you share to what each audience actually needs to know.
What to do when your story lacks substance
After reading these six signs, you might be realizing your company has gaps—most do. The honest reality is that your greatest opportunity for influence as a sustainability communicator often comes precisely at this moment when someone asks you to communicate something you know isn’t ready.
You can push back. You can refuse to announce targets without implementation plans. You can insist on connecting sustainability to business priorities before making external claims. Advocating for substance over spin is how you protect your own credibility, not just your company’s.
Next up is the final C: Compliant—and why the legal and regulatory dimensions of sustainability communication matters more than ever.
The Four C’s of Effective Sustainability Storytelling is the framework at the heart of Sustainability Storytelling: Communicate Trust, Brand Value and Better Business—where I go deep on each of the Six Signs of Sustainability Substance with case studies, tools, and practitioner insights.
Available for pre-order now.
