Even the accountancy profession is talking about communications. Time and again it proclaims that financial and non-financial reporting (especially in relation to climate and nature impacts) should be integrated; but increasingly it says that this integration – and the outcomes of business strategy underpinned by green credentials – should be communicated. But it rarely is.

We are yet to see the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) working hand in glove with the Chief Communications Officer, but wouldn’t it be great to prise the sustainability report off the communications/sustainability team and the annual report off the investor relations team and put it through a single integrated team led by the CFO with all stakeholder audiences accommodated?

Why the CFO? Because climate action for businesses means capital expenditure. That is the only way. It’s time to stop just talking about action and start to invest in business transformation and then communicate the strategy, the ambition, the outcomes and the data that supports everything to all stakeholders with the right messaging on the channels and in the moments in which the messaging is most likely to be heard.

And isn’t it time also that corporate reporting became streamlined, pithy, pertinent and reveal what a resilient climate and nature-friendly business looks like and how it is governed? Perhaps then the idea that AI can do a better job of communicating a company’s purpose, performance and impacts would be put to rest.

But companies don’t just communicate through reporting – that’s probably the least of it – they communicate through how they show up, the provenance and processes associated with their products, the way they deliver their services, and how they are judged by analysts, the press and consumers.

It’s not just a question of brand and reputation; it’s more to do with value. What is the value of each company’s contribution to the new economy, Industrial Revolution 5.0 and a healthy planet? What is it taking out of the world and what does it contribute? How is it shaping balanced supply chains, what is it adding to policy and how is it taking its people with it?

All of this must be communicated.

When a company gets this right, there is so much positivity to communicate and much less scope for greenwashing. And greenhushing becomes a nonsense – all a company is communicating is what it is actually doing; and it is communicating that for the purposes of compliance as well as for PR.

As the marketing and advertising industry seeks to understand its role in a resilient world where encouraging over-consumption is not always a good look, why is communicating resilience, being future-fit and doing the work on re-engineering business strategy around planetary limits not top of the agenda?

These are strange times. Companies doing the right thing rarely shout about them – but they should as the climate movement sorely needs influencers to lead the way. Meanwhile, companies who think they can do nothing in terms of decarbonisation regularly seek to greenwash or at least make dodgy green claims.

Communications aside, there has to be transition and a plan to get companies from old economy thinking to new.
Without transition, there will be crisis – we are already seeing companies rehearse crisis communications around scenarios such as natural disasters, conflict exacerbated by climate and nature loss, extreme heat, poor air quality, pandemics and so on. Today there is still scope for communications as a pure exercise in storytelling. Tomorrow those stories will not look so good.