Ep. 2: 2024 sustainability communication trends
If there's one things corporate sustainability professionals love more than a healthy serving of alphabet soup with our many acronyms, it's trying to make predictions about what will happen in this truly unpredictable space. But in this episode of The Sustainability Communicator, Mike takes a crack at it anyway. Here are some things to look for in sustainability communication in 2024.
Read the full transcript of the conversation below. You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and YouTube.
TRANSCRIPT
I know. I'm already a month late with my 2024 sustainability comms predictions. But here we go anyway.
Hey everybody, and welcome to the sustainability communicator — the podcast, exploring the intersection of corporate sustainability and storytelling. I'm your host, Mike Hower, a sustainability communication nerd with more than 15 years of experience on both sides of the podium — as a journalist for media outlets like GreenBiz and a communication strategist for major global companies — during each episode, we explore interesting sustainability communication, challenges, risks, and opportunities facing folks in the business community and beyond. If you're ready to talk your walk, then you've come to the right place. Time to get to it.
First of all, I know about a month late to the 2024 sustainability predictions party. By now, your LinkedIn feeds and podcast queues have probably been bombarded by all manner of experts trying their hand at climate clairvoyance or whatever you want to call it. If there's one thing, corporate sustainability professionals love more than yet another serving of delicious alphabet soup, it's trying to act like we can actually predict what will happen in this absolutely unpredictable and dynamic space. That's why I'm only partially embarrassed to be a month late with my own predictions for sustainability comms in 2024. In the world of corporate sustainability, the only certainty is that the unexpected will occur. So take these predictions with a grain of salt. That being said, I'm definitely seeing some trends in sustainability comms I think are helpful to keep an eye on as we move deeper into 2024.
The first unmistakable trend is that the role of the sustainability communicator is being redefined. This is so apparent that I devoted an entire episode to it. So, be sure to check that out if you haven't already. For some, sustainability communication is — by definition — a dirty business because of the long history of pervasive greenwashing. The thought is that sustainability communication and marketing professionals exist to tout a company's wins while downplaying its failures. This can be no more — the role of the sustainability communicator is to help companies engage stakeholders by telling the whole story of sustainability. This means talking about the difficulties, setbacks and failures on the path to becoming a better company. And this is at odds with the traditional mindset of corporate communications and marketing, which is to — quote unquote — spin the story to make the company look as favorable as possible and manage risks. But we live in an era that demands greater transparency. Failing to tell the whole story means creating unnecessary risks, especially today.
The second sustainability comms trend I'm seeing play out in 2024 is that sustainability stories must now be compelling and compliant. With a litany of new regulations coming from Europe and in the United States, the stakes of communicating sustainability are higher than ever. Greenwashing comes with hefty fines and threats of lawsuits and effective sustainability communicators must learn to balance compliance with compelling narratives. This means communications, marketing, sustainability and legal teams must work together.
For the longest time, lawyers were seen as kind of the party poopers of sustainability communication, so to speak. And I have often been frustrated with what would happen when a legal team would shut down a sustainability effort or sustainably communications effort I was working on. But something that's changed, especially in this new era of increased regulation, is that lawyers need to be our friends now. They can't just shut the story down because companies need to say something. So now it's more important than ever for the marketing team and sustainability team to get together with the legal team to really figure out — what are the things that we can talk about? What are the things that we're not ready to talk about? And then what do we need to do to change the substance of our sustainability program so that we can actually make these claims that engage our stakeholders and also tell a truthful story of progress?
The third trend is tied to the fact that it's a pivotal election year and companies must get more political on climate action. For years, government relations and sustainability teams have been unaligned — or even at odds with one another. I've seen this a lot firsthand myself. With 2024 being one of the most important elections for climate, companies just can't stay silent anymore. Companies really need to start to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to climate policy action. It's already clear that we're not going to solve the climate crisis through voluntary corporate actions. We need good public policy to set the rules of engagement that incentivizes innovation.
And a lot of companies are afraid to do this for a lot of reasons I don't need to get into today. You know, their government relations programs often emphasize a favorable tax policy over anything else, which more often than not doesn't align with the same elected officials that are promoting climate action. But I think that's something we're going to be seeing more and more as time goes on — that the companies that really believe in sustainability will make sure that they're backing candidates that don't hinder climate action and hopefully are promoting it — and really get more transparent about that. There's a great group called ClimateVoice that, uh, Bill Weihl, has started. He was the former Facebook Sustainability Director and he's doing some great work getting employees more involved at tech companies and other organizations to push their leaders to do more on that front. We haven't been seeing enough of it and I really want to see more of this happen in the 2024 election cycle.
The fourth trend many of us are already seeing so far this year is the fact that the word sustainability — well as it pretty much already has — is regaining dominance over ESG. While it seemed like everyone was talking about ESG just a year ago, the events of 2023 made ESG lose favor with many audiences. So, ESG will become more about compliance while sustainability will regain its central role as the descriptor of a corporate effort to address social environmental impacts.
For a couple of years there, many corporate sustainability professionals — including myself — were using ESG terminology interchangeably with sustainability. And a lot of that was just for efficacy purposes. Oftentimes, we were communicating with folks who it would be just way too complex to try to get around the fact that they're two different concepts, but now we're entering this new phase of sophistication with sustainability comms, where we really need to differentiate between the two. I'm actually moderating a panel at GreenBiz this year where we're going to be debating the difference between ESG and sustainability — and how you can formulate effective strategies to communicate them moving forward.
And the fact that we still need to talk about these at conferences just goes to show how there still really isn't a solid agreement on how to use these words or acronyms. And we're kind of figuring that out. So, I think in 2024, that's going to be honed in a little bit more. ESG is going to really be more focused on the compliance piece, and then sustainability is going to be more about how the company is approaching programmatic changes to social, environmental advancements.
The fifth trend might sound a little self-serving for someone who makes a living telling sustainability stories. But I believe we'll see the demand for sustainability communicators boom in 2024. With so much need for nuanced sustainability communications, companies will begin to invest more in roles for folks who can effectively translate between sustainability and communication and marketing teams. Expect to see more sustainability comms roles and more companies hiring consultants with sustainability comms expertise.
As I've talked about many times before — and I'll probably talk about many, many other times to come — often what you have in the corporate sustainability ecosystem is sustainability professionals that are kind of more technical and more focused on the programmatic side of things. So these are the folks that are working on carbon accounting, they're working on the spreadsheets and the numbers that are making sure that the decarbonization strategies are working and, and so forth. But then you've got the communicators who at big corporations tend to be generalists, or they're focused more on product marketing or corporate communications and they're not sustainability practitioners and they don't have deep subject matter expertise on really anything around sustainability. So, when you put the two together, you have one group that's more technical and deep into the numbers and the strategy. And then on the other side, you've got the storytellers that don't really understand sustainability at the core or really how to communicate those topics. And so, you're increasingly going to need people who can go between the two groups.These are people who have strong communication skills and have strong sustainability subject matter expertise. So, they might not be going deep into the numbers and, and the technical details, but they can understand it at a deep enough level that they can translate that into effective communication.
So these are the key trends I'm seeing with sustainability communication. Did I miss any? I'd love to hear from you. You can always reach me via email or on LinkedIn, and I'll include these details in the show notes.
And with that, we've reached the end of this episode of the sustainability communicator podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you like what you heard and you'd like to hear more, stay tuned for future episodes that cover a variety of topics in sustainability storytelling.
To stay in the know of future episodes and other content. You can follow me, Mike Hower, on LinkedIn — or you can follow us on our newsletter, which comes out not as often as I'd like but at least once a month. You can sign up for that in the show notes and you can visit us on our website. At www.howerimpact.com
Wherever you are in your sustainability journey. Good luck. And keep at it. We need you out there.
