Is sustainability’s language leaving everyone behind?
Within sustainability, businesses are currently experiencing immense pressure to shift from compliance-based reporting to impact-based storytelling.
Sustainability is being held to the same standard as every other business function, and rightly so. Investments must be value-driven, goals must align with the wider business strategy, and outcomes must be measurable. This is not a threat to sustainability; it is a sign of its maturity.
But to seize this moment, the sustainability profession must confront an uncomfortable truth about itself… sustainability is being held back by its own language.
The ‘green ceiling’
Terms like ‘double materiality’, ‘Scope 3’, and ‘upstream emissions’, not to mention the numerous acronyms that exist, have created a barrier that makes sustainability feel niche, technical and exclusive.
This is the ‘green ceiling,’ an invisible barrier built not from opposition or apathy, but from language that shuts people out before the conversation has even begun.
Rather than bringing legitimacy to the profession, this jargon has isolated the very people needed to drive change.
The irony runs deep. Most sustainability professionals know that achieving their goals depends almost entirely on teams outside of sustainability, those in procurement, supply chain, finance teams and many more. Yet the language of sustainability remains stubbornly inaccessible to all of them.
Embracing your own impact
For businesses, the most important step is not to chase the language that wins awards or signals best practice. It is to use communication that reflects your own business – your material issues, your stakeholders, your strategy.
Truly embedded sustainability means sustainability teams speaking the language of the business, not the other way around. The goal was never to teach procurement how to talk about Scope 3, or to get the CFO fluent in double materiality. It was for sustainability professionals to understand what keeps those functions up at night: cost, risk, resilience and reputation, and to show up to those conversations on those terms. Sustainability does not need a seat at the table; it needs to earn one by being useful to the people already sitting there.
Sustainability communication that is authentic to a company’s context will always outperform the generic. It will land with colleagues who would otherwise disengage. It will resonate with investors who are increasingly attuned to greenwashing, and it will hold up in today’s climate of scrutiny.
The credibility gap
The language problem is compounded by a behavioural one. Companies invest significant resources discussing injustice, climate risk and biodiversity net gain in polished reports, whilst in some cases failing to apply those same principles closer to home. As frameworks layer on top of each other and the ‘tick-boxes’ multiply, the gap between the sustainability conversation and the people it claims to serve grows wider.
When sustainability becomes so opaque that it requires a specialist to interpret it, it has become counterproductive to the collective action it was always meant to inspire.
Looking forward
Sustainability is facing real headwinds. But for those working in this space, this moment of pressure is also an opportunity – to refocus on what is genuinely material, to strip back complexity, and to speak plainly.
Most people within a business do not understand sustainability. Most businesses are not yet acting on it with sufficient urgency. The profession’s obsession with jargon and metrics undermines the very mission it exists to serve.
The ceiling is one we built ourselves. Which means we are also the ones who can take it down.
Get in touch
If you’d like to discuss this, or any other subject, please get in touch with Katy Heather, Head of Sustainability, at katy@gather.london
We’d love to know what you think.