Climate Change: Still a Communications Failure

While published last year, David Fenton's op-ed on climate communications is more timely and more relevant than ever.

As Fenton writes, the large scale ignorance and confusion regarding climate change "is due to decades of fossil fuel industry propaganda. But the environmental advocacy organizations, their funders and the Obama and Biden White House share some of the blame: They have never mounted a campaign at scale to get the truth to the public."

ABSOLUTELY TRUE. AND...

"In the U.S., although environmental advocacy organizations bring in billions of dollars a year, almost nothing goes to public communication, and most of that is for fundraising. This guarantees failure on the battlefield of public opinion. ”

The climate change language and messaging is, for the most part, convoluted, off-putting and DULL.

So when I see recent findings by the ClimateWorks Foundation concluding that climate change mitigation philanthropy has remained flat and is disappointing, I too am disappointed but not surprised. Why isn't communications key to the Climate Works 2023 funding trends report, much less to the cultural conversation? While report author Helene Desanlis points to giving trends and the need for multi-year grants, I wonder how much organizations make communications messaging central to securing those grants. While Helen M.ountford declares that ...“This report should be a wake-up call for philanthropy. The intensifying climate crisis demands greater ambition, scale, and urgency to safeguard lives"....I think, EXACTLY. That means that organizations should be funding and prioritizing communications that are strategic, clear and compelling.

If it's widely acknowledged that mobilization is key to shifting public sentiment and creating change, nonprofits and policy-makers need to shift the climate change narrative to make it engaging and actionable. It's not what these organizations are saying that's the problem it's HOW. Research shows that people do not much know what terms like “net zero,” “carbon,” “emissions” and “climate justice” even mean so how could they possibly care?

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RE-CRAFTING ESG REPORTS TO RESONATE

For most companies, producing an ESG report is a total bear. Deciding which framework to use, collecting data, conducting materiality assessments, internally sourcing and sharing your so-called sustainability stories… it’s a Sisyphean time suck, which for too many businesses, results in a report that misses the mark by trying to hit too many marks all at once.  

 Apart from being posted and promoted via a few Tweets, Facebook posts and maybe an article or two, the project is too often done and dusted within a few weeks after launch. The harsh truth is that your core audience for these reports—investors and analysts—would be happier to see your ESG data delivered in the form of spreadsheets. Your other stakeholder groups—consumers, customers, communities, the media—are, for their part, even less likely to spend precious time and fleeting attention fishing through a 100-page ESG report for nuggets of information, even if attractively packaged alongside brand-building stories.

Static reports, in short, particularly voluminous ones, are not necessarily the best channel to deliver information that resonates, inspires, motivates, and activates stakeholders. These audiences need to be emotionally engaged, ideally by a cascade of compelling content that lives alongside, not inside, your report.

To get the most out of the ESG reporting process, businesses would be best served by transcending the silos whose boundaries make too many worthy reports sink, not swim:

Consulting Communications

Rather than relegating ESG reporting exclusively to the sustainability team at your company, give the communications experts a seat at the table from the get-go. Strategic communicators can help integrate the ESG reporting process and product into the overall communications plan, ensuring that it ladders up to the business strategy and that ESG efforts, initiatives and achievements are fully integrated into a company’s DNA.

Targeting and Segmenting Key Stakeholder Audiences

 While ESG reports are useful vehicles for sharing key information about environmental, social and governance practices, they don’t necessarily align with stakeholder concerns—even when the ESG data is supported by so-called sustainability stories. To be sticky, those stories need to be targeted, packaged and promoted to address the unique interests and aspirations of the various stakeholder group. Stories that resonate with one audience may not resonate with another.

Consumers for example—particularly millennials—want to know they’re supporting businesses that contribute to the environmental and social well-being of the world. However, chances are they’re not gathering that information by leafing through your ESG report. Employees want to derive meaning from their work. In fact, the accounting firm PWC recently found that 86% of employees prefer to support or work for companies that care about the same issues they do. Again, employees would probably prefer to find out about a company’s sustainability stance from, say, a video or an infographic—a medium more accessible than a stodgy, voluminous report.

Engaging Stakeholders Emotionally

While reports deliver key data and even stories, effective communications go beyond the delivery of information. Communications is meaningful and actionable when it persuades people by evoking and emotional response.

In other words, prospective employees not only know they’re working for a company that is contributing to good, they want to feel proud of their place of work.

Consumers want to know they’re making responsible choices and to feel that the purposes of the businesses they patronize and support are aligned with their own.

Beyond knowing that a company is protecting natural resources and contributing to the lives of the people who live there, community members what to feel cared for.

So…rather than investing time, money, and effort in producing a 100-page report that most likely will never be read cover to cover, consider trimming your company’s virtual ESG pages and reallocating that time, money and effort by strategically targeting and telling your sustainability stories in ways, and via channels, where those audiences are already spending their precious time.

IS YOUR ESG REPORT DESTINED FOR THE RECYCLE BIN?

ESG reports are primarily just that: reports. They inform and analyze. On their own, they’re not communications tools meant to inspire or engage. They don’t have a call to action. That’s because ESG reports are primarily intended for number crunchers—hard-headed investors and analysts who want to understand your company’s exposure to risk; your approach to managing, anticipating, and mitigating that risk; to measuring progress toward defined targets—including science-based carbon emissions, for example—and your company’s approach to more sustainable value creation over time.

In my experience, however, that’s where ESG reporting often gets bollixed up. Ask the Chief Sustainability Officer, who is generally charged with overseeing the production of the report who their primary audience is, and that seemingly straightforward question is often met with a bunch of hemming and hawing—investors, employees, consumers, customers, NGOs—you name it.

And that’s where the—or at least a—problem lies. Without a clearly defined target audience—or even a few of them, reports sprawl to 100 plus pages, filled with—from the POV of investors and analysts—fluff.

The reality is that while investors and analysts may feel responsibility to people and the planet, they have a fiduciary responsibility is to their clients. That’s why they’re probably not particularly interested in your so-called sustainability stories—the tug-at-the-heartstrings narratives of how your company donated backpacks to local schoolchildren in need, or the crafts club started by ten of your employees for a nearby nursing home or the cans of soup you donated to families during the holidays.

Investors and analysts want to understand at a granular level that your company is a good and reliable bet—particularly as the frequency and severity of storms increase, fires rage out of control and the demand for reducing the emissions that lead to climate change rises.

They want to know that you have transition plans in place, based on science-based targets, to reach net zero emissions. They want to know that your governance is diverse and that your company has a diversity and inclusion plan in place. They want to know that you’re protecting natural capital—biodiversity—by eliminating deforestation and developing sustainable supply chains. They want to know that you’re creating long-term sustainable value.

So no matter which reporting framework you choose—Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) or Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)—investors what to know that you’re collecting accurate, consistent data. As businesses wait for the Securities and Exchange Commission to provide clarity on climate disclosures, businesses can still adopt a lean, efficient and cost-effective approach to reporting—one that will demonstrate to investors and analysts that your company is a good bet now and in the future.

To engage stakeholders, ESG reports must go beyond data and get to the ‘why’

COMMENT: Carol Goodstein explains how storytelling backed by data can be a vital tool in communicating a company's purpose to different audiences

Health risks, supply chain disruptions, gender rights and equity, climate change – the Covid-19 pandemic has lent new urgency to ESG (environmental, social and governance) factors, highlighting, in particular, the social aspects and linking environmental risks to broader societal challenges.

The good news? Bolstered by champions including BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink, investors are more engaged than ever before.

The bad news? While investors are demanding quantitative data, if companies fail to address the growing scrutiny of their operations and social stances by non-number crunching audiences – the consumers, colleagues and communities who prefer to support businesses whose purpose aligns with their own – and provide them with qualitative context and content, they risk losing the trust and loyalty of those stakeholders to competitors.

Businesses have an opportunity to use their reports so that their reason for being and doing aligns with the concerns of their stakeholder audiences

The best news? Businesses everywhere have an opportunity to use their reports to position themselves so that their reason for being and doing aligns with the concerns of their various stakeholder audiences. In other words, beyond the myopic and granular data collection, companies can engage internal and external audiences and, most importantly, capture and retain their trust, by giving them a reason to care.

A few years ago, engagement was sustained by so-called sustainability storytelling, which offered colour and context to otherwise arid CSR and ESG reports. The problem was that after being all the rage, storytelling came to be seen as flabby or even fictional. And, at its most blatantly self-promotional, “greenwashing”.

Data and story, however, need not be at odds. In fact, when properly woven together, they lend credibility to strong ESG reporting and serve to reinforce a company’s purpose, mission and aspirations. By using data to support their stories, companies have an opportunity to engage all stakeholders – not only investors and analysts – around their ESG efforts. That means focusing not just on the metrics themselves but on their meaning – as the business writer Simon Sinek often says, on their “why”. Sinek writes: “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. What you do simply proves what you believe.”

Woven together, data and stories can lend credibility to ESG reporting. (Credit: tadamichi/Shutterstock)

Take a close look at nearly any ESG report. Chances are, it’s filled with data categorised by pillars that align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And that’s all well and good. But rather than simply measuring risk management against these goals, what about creating the context for why?

It’s not because your company believes that the world needs to be a better place – although that’s certainly part of it – but because the world is facing critical, urgent and even alarming challenges. By making operational changes and using ESG data to inform your sustainability strategy, you’re becoming part of the solution that aligns with stakeholder concerns. That’s why.

While today, some 90% of companies in the S&P 500 produce corporate sustainability reports, all of which are compiled at great cost and effort, most of the public debate around ESG reporting focuses not on sustainability strategy or even risk management but on choice of framework – Global Reporting Initiative, the Task Force on Climate-related Disclosures or Sustainability Accounting Standards Board – and data harmonisation. Companies are compiling so much data that not even their investor audiences can easily access the most relevant nuggets.

We found that when CEOs did well at communicating corporate purpose, stock prices and trade volume rose

Meanwhile, these companies have the opportunity to make ESG quantitative data not only more accessible to investors but to maximise their return on investment in their ESG reports by using them to demonstrate to their stakeholders that their corporate approach to sustainability is more than merely a check-the-box accounting exercise, that it is fully embedded throughout business operations and company ethos – "baked in and not bolted on" as Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer puts it.

While it’s widely accepted that sustainability is a driver of innovation, the means by which it is communicated should also be innovative, creative and reflect a brand’s commitment to cutting-edge solutions. Not only is providing context compelling, it can be profitable. As Harvard Business School’s George Serafeim, an internationally recognised authority on ESG investing, wrote: “We found that when CEOs did well at communicating corporate purpose, stock prices and trade volume rose in the following days. The implication is that investors find value in information about purpose.”

Unfortunately for most firms, the ESG reporting process is a siloed exercise that generally falls somewhere within the company’s sustainability, operations and management team. But when communications is considered from the start, the outcome can look quite different than an accounting exercise.

Using ESG data to engage and inform can help business align with stakeholders'concerns. (Credit: Lumppni/Shutterstock)

We found that when CEOs did well at communicating corporate purpose, stock prices and trade volume rose. From a practical perspective, that means including strategic communications from the start of the ESG reporting process and not as a Johnny-come-lately. So when the discussion of the materiality assessment kicks off, the communicators on the team can strategically consider the various audiences, map information to meet their needs and interests, and plan to contextualise that information through stories and content. They can even be involved in the stakeholder interview process.

The key is to use the data to tell and support persuasive stories where the protagonists may be the consumers, employees, communities or the company itself. In other words, the data is not the end in itself but a means to an end – to build trust, not only among citizens, communities, consumers and employees but even among investors.

In Target’s CSR report, Amanda Nusz, vice president of corporate responsibility, writes passionately about the quest for real engagement: “We’re on a journey to reimagine not just how our products and service are designed, but what their impact is while they’re being used by our guests, and how we can provide our guests with end-of-use solutions so that they can feel good about what they’re buying. As well as being sustainably designed and made, our products must be inclusive and affordable and reflect our guests’ expectations.”

The key here is to give people a reason to feel good. Stories, not numbers, evoke feelings, trust and support. ESG data proves that stories not only are true but ring true.

Carol Goodstein has developed effective strategies and award-winning campaigns and content for brands including Lipton, IKEA and Staples.  After serving as the long-term Director of Communications & Marketing for the Rainforest Alliance, she currently advises leading businesses and nonprofits on positioning their sustainability achievements and aspirations.

It's time to prioritize the survival of indigenous people, the world's forest stewards

Hunting and gathering for food is taking on a whole new meaning of late. The ever-lengthening line at my local Whole Foods starts to wrap around the outside of the store before 7 a.m., as socially distanced shoppers — securely donned in gloves, masks and even plastic face shields — wait nervously to scavenge for their week’s worth of essentials along with their COVID-19 indulgences: the extra bars of Hu chocolates and Enjoy Life cookies, in my family’s case.

We once thought of foraging as an activity engaged in only by our very remote ancestors and distant "primitive" people. But the spread of COVID-19 has heightened the subsistence survival instinct in all of us. In a way, we are not so dissimilar from "primitive" people in places such as the Amazon Basin as we might have thought. 

And now, we’re all vulnerable to the same pandemic virus. Only with virtually no resistance, no access to medical treatment and a government that condones the deforestation and development of their lands, it’s far worse for indigenous people.

Companies and consumers everywhere have a role to play. In fact, COVID-19 has created an opportunity for companies to be more cognizant and compassionate in their approach — more aware of the direct and indirect responsibility for the impact they have on people in places where they operate.

So as the spread of COVID sickens and kills front-line workers in meat-packing plants across the country and suppliers are forced to curtail operations — leaving the meat section of local supermarkets looking, well, a little lean — what about the places where this meat comes from, namely Brazil, which according to the USDA is the world’s largest beef exporter?

Tribal people living in the Amazon Basin have been made even more vulnerable to the virus by the recent uptick in deforestation.

While many companies are doing right by their workers in U.S. plants, why not — in the spirit of cognizant corporate citizenship, stakeholder accountability and stewardship, let alone brand reputation — help to protect people in Brazil that are not only particularly vulnerable to the virus but whose very survival is directly linked to the protection of forests? 

While the current pandemic may be overwhelming America’s medical system, killing our healthcare workers, tanking our economy and generally frying our collective nerves, the indigenous people of Brazil — the country from which a lot of our meat as well as the soy used to feed farm animals is produced — have virtually no access to healthcare, let alone hand sanitizer.

President Jair Bolsonaro, along with slashing funding mandated to protect indigenous rights and proposing to open up oil and gas exploration and hydropower development on indigenous territories, effectively eliminated the availability of rural healthcare by driving out the thousands of Cuban healthcare providers who used to service indigenous communities prior to his presidency.

As the nationwide death toll in Brazil soars above 11,000 and reliable data on indigenous infections and deaths is hard to come by, a recent survey by the Brazilian Indigenous Peoples' Association found the virus has reached 38 groups in the country with 446 cases of the new coronavirus and 92 deaths reported as of mid-May, mainly in the Brazilian Amazon.

Tribal people living in the Amazon Basin have been made even more vulnerable to the virus by the recent uptick in deforestation, up by nearly 64 percent in April, compared to the same month last year, according to data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research. Last month alone, more than 156 square miles of rainforest were destroyed — an area about the size of Philadelphia.

While indigenous people are locking down like the rest us, when they do, their lands are left even more vulnerable to brazen land grabbing, which also has been alarmingly on the rise. 

Well before the pandemic, Bolsonaro made no secret of his intention to open the Amazon to increased economic activity, and he’s been determined since the start of his time in office not to let indigenous tribes stand in his way.

As he said, "They don’t work. They don’t bring in money for Brazil, only burdens."

Meanwhile, Bolsonaro has downplayed the effects of the virus even more than other presidents, describing it as a "little flu" and a trifling "cold" and accused the media of manufacturing "hysteria."

Emboldened by Bolsonaro’s stance, indigenous leaders have been targeted in increasing numbers over the past year — even before the outbreak of the virus. Last year, there were at least 10 documented indigenous murders, as Bolsonaro effectively has declared open season on indigenous peoples who stand in the way of economic expansion, writ deforestation.

While the Bolsonaro administration has made its dismissive if not genocidal attitude toward indigenous people patently clear, agribusinesses operating in Brazil could, just for example, step in.

The opportunity to display corporate social responsibility has taken on new urgency as indigenous leaders call out these businesses as culprits in the ravaging of their lands and families.

"What we are asking from the multinationals is that they not buy commodities that cause deforestation and conflict and that are produced on indigenous lands. We are also demanding that bilateral trade agreements … demand respect for indigenous rights and ensure there are no products linked to deforestation coming into their countries," declared Dinamam Tuxá, coordinator and legal adviser to the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil.

While a number of soy and beef producing companies have set time-bound targets for eliminating deforestation from their supply chains, deforestation continues to escalate. 

Shoppers at Sam’s Club, Safeway and Target may notice a paucity of meat at their local megastores, but all of us have a collective responsibility to protect the indigenous people who help to protect lands and species on which we all depend. 

In addition to banning, or at least dramatically reducing deforestation, why don’t companies, while they’re at it, support communities who know a thing or two not only about hunting and gathering but about protecting the lungs of our world?

WHAT'S YOUR WHY? AND WHY SHARING IT WILL GET YOU HEARD

In what is still one of the  truest, most inspiring and relevant TED Talks ever, How Business Leaders Inspire Action, best-selling writer Simon Sinek spoke about the key to successful communication: Start With Why.

The concept, nearly magical in its power to persuade, works. And it’s dazzlingly simple. Rather than starting with what you’re doing and how, the trick is to start off with your purpose, your beliefs. Get people in the gut, is the concept.

Given the number of views of the talk—48 million—and the sales of Sinek’s five books, I continue to be stumped by the disconnect:

WHY are so many businesses and nonprofits talking about their successes, particularly around sustainability, without referring to their why?

I challenge you to take a look at any CSR report at random. Nine times out of ten or more, it’s a nicely illustrated laundry list, punctuated by punchy infographics that describe the year’s successes and how they align with the UN SDG’s. Snore. Honestly, why would anyone give a rat’s rump? It’s only slightly more compelling than an Excel spread sheet.

Even with all of the talk about  sustainability storytelling—a squishy concept at best —there’s not a lot of why out there.

Why not?

Because it’s tough talk about why—takes some reflection, introspection and can leave you waffling in vulnerability..   

Uncomfortable as it might feel at first, next time you craft a blog, draft a report, share an article or deliver a speech, ask yourself a few why’s.  Get your audience to aspire along with you. Why are you personally compelled to save the planet from complete and utter annihilation?

WHY…

• Do you care?

• Are you personally driven to do the work you do?

• Do you believe in the direction your organization is taking?

• Will you not quit until you reach your north star, no matter what it takes to get there?

SUSTAINABILITY IS BRAND-CHALLENGED

Think about the attributes that great brands share—passion, purpose and clarity.  They’re distinctive, interesting and engaging. Then think of sustainability. Ugh.  Even the word rings wrong. It’s leaden, virtuous, earnest, wonky, dense, dorky. A literary liability—in the US, anyway.  In the UK and in other places, sustainability is bouncier, younger and actually speaks to people, not at them.

The question is how to sex up sustainability so the “s” word sounds less stale.

AVOID IT:  The word, that is. Because the concept is so squishy, few people are entirely sure what sustainability actually means. For the most part, you’re better to talk about the issues that fall under this awkward and ungainly category— climate change or biodiversity loss or worker rights. Then, get granular. Or—depending on your audience—you may want to wear it loud and proud because there’s no simple, single-word substitute. It’s a lumpy concept, which is why talking about it is so tricky.

SPIT IT OUT:  Because it’s so complex, the very word sustainability seems to give people a license to be grammatically challenged if not entirely incoherent. Here, at random, are a couple of sentences pulled from the websites of leading sustainability organizations. No wonder the public can’t get its head—much less heart— around sustainability.

[OUR ORGANIZATION] enables the success of better brands by providing direction to key trends and emerging best practices, as well delivers tools and resources to support the implementation of transformational programs within companies.

 [OUR ORGANIZATION’S ROLE] is to catalyze change within business by integrating sustainability into strategy and operations, and to promote collaboration among companies and their stakeholders for systemic progress toward a just and sustainable world.

Say what? When you’re talking about sustainability or climate change, or pollution or economic inequity, knotty language doesn’t sound smart—it’s just bad for the brand.

GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD: The right side of it, anyway. Even the most creative innovators go cerebral when it comes to describing how they’re making their mark and improving the [FILL IN THE BLANK]. The trick is to change hearts. If you’re doing something good—like working to remove micro-plastics from fish gills—make it feel good to your audience—give them something to celebrate and aspire to by creating emotional resonance.

SOUNDING TOO GOOD IS BAD. Nobody likes a brown nose. I’m not suggesting you lighten up the topic of sustainability to trivialize it but to liven it up. The idea is not to make good work sound bad, but edgy can be good and in the case of sustainability, refreshing. While ads promoting diversity and gun control tug at the heartstrings, as a rule, copy that talks about sustainability sounds hopped on virtue and piousness. That’s because organizations still seem to think they need to tediously sustainability-explain, which like mansplaining, is so not good that it’s bad.

Bottom line, when it comes to sustainability branding, as Bob Marley sang, liven up yourself and don’t be no drag.

STOP STORYTELLING. START TRUTH TELLING

I’ve been wracking my brains, trying to conjure up a new and original blog post to write on storytelling—the value of brand narratives and sustainability stories. Then I watched the video of Greta Thunberg, who in her address to the delegates UN Climate Action Summit declared that it’s time to “tell it like is.”

That evening—yesterday, in fact—I attended a reception for the International Center for Journalists where Joyce Barnathan, the organization’s president said that, “As the risks for reporters get higher and higher, it’s time to join forces and back a free press because nothing less than our democracies are at stake.” She also talked about recently attending a US journalism conference, where the venue was protected by armed security guards.

This morning, I read an op-ed by New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger, who chillingly described how journalists everywhere are under threat. “Over the last few years, however, something has dramatically changed,” wrote Sulzberger. “Around the globe, a relentless campaign is targeting journalists because of the fundamental role they play in ensuring a free and informed society. To stop journalists from exposing uncomfortable truths and holding power to account, a growing number of governments have engaged in overt, sometimes violent, efforts to discredit their work and intimidate them into silence.”

Meanwhile, in the face of the threats to journalists and journalism, those of us in the business of social-good communications refer to “storytelling.” Storytelling to elevate your brand. Storytelling to connect with your consumer audience. Storytelling to demonstrate your company’s commitment to social good.

Storytellers, as we know, are often truth embellishers if not outright truth deniers. They exaggerate for effect. While their goal may be to tell a universal truth, they don’t necessarily go about it by telling the truth.

Sustainability storytelling? Shouldn’t we be talking about truth telling? If companies want to proclaim that they’re redefining the role of business in our society, as the CEO members of the Business Roundtable recently did, then as communications professionals, we need to do better than help these companies tell their stories. We need to help them share their truths.

If companies are walking the walking for real—setting clearly articulated and measurable targets with timelines and deadlines—around carbon emissions, energy efficiency, diversity—then high time to tell it like it is. No more stories.

4 Levers to Build a Better Policy to Stop the Amazon Fires

Because the deliberately set fires torching the Amazon right now are not the result of presidential policies, rapacious agribusinesses, or carnivorous consumers alone, there’s no single tactic that will sufficiently extinguish them. Like many of our most urgent and overwhelming environmental and social challenges, the 80,000 blazes threatening to burn to a crisp vast swaths of one of the world’s most critical places are the result of a complex web of interlocking political and financial influences and interests. Taken together, these powerful forces are currently conspiring to prioritize short-term economic gain over the long-term protection of one of the world’s most valuable resources, critical not just to our own but many other species’ survival.

What makes the Amazon Basin, which crosses national boundaries, such a vitally important natural asset—not just to Brazilians but to everyone, everywhere—is the unique role that it plays in curbing climate change. That’s also what makes finding a systematic, sustainable solution to what many regard as an intractable problem imperative for all 7.7 billion on the planet, and particularly for the people who live in the Amazon.

While the fires have dramatically grown and engulfed this vulnerable region with increasing fury ever since the populist, anti-environmental Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro took office in January 2019, fires have been burning the great forested basin for decades, off and on. But recently, with the support of Brazil’s powerful agricultural lobby, Bolsonaro, like Trump, has been deploying an aggressively pro-business, anti-regulation agenda to ostensibly pave the way for accelerated economic growth. Unlike business leaders who maintain that economic progress can be compatible with conservation, Bolsonaro and Trump thuggishly insist otherwise.

What are the levers that will wield the most influence and drive long-term systematic change? A knotty combination of foreign and local governments, business interests, investors, and nonprofit organizations.

GOVERNMENT

Farmers in the Amazon have long used fire as the most efficient method of illegally clearing forest, to make way for crops and cattle grazing. While experienced farmers maintain they know how to control the fires, they also claim that the current wave of destruction has been set off by inexperienced land settlers, ranchers, and speculators who sell their deforested land for up to six times the price of fines imposed by the government—that is even when weak deforestation policies are enforced.

Just like President Trump, populist President Bolsonaro’s rise to victory on a pro-development platform has only fanned the flames and fury. It’s no small irony that while the right-wing nationalist Brazilian president is being roundly attacked for his tacit encouragement of the forest’s destruction in neighboring Bolivia, where the president Evo Morales is proudly indigenous and left-leaning, fires are also raging out of control.

Now that activists have called for boycotts of Brazilian leather and 15 fashion labels have complied, Brazil’s agricultural sector has started to lean on Bolsonaro to ease tensions with the international community. And while he has said that farmers and loggers would not be allowed to set fires to clear land, in the absence of land reform to clarify ownership and rights, funding and enforcement, patrolling the forest is practically impossible.

Starting in the 1970s, the Brazilian government appropriated vast tracts of the Amazon, providing a steady stream of incentives for settlers to develop the forest by allowing squatters who can establish economic activity on a parcel for five years to buy the title at a discount. Two years ago, that law was expanded to allow for the privatization of large swaths of government land. Now, it’s often not clear who owns what, making it hard for local governments to hold individuals responsible for deforestation.

TRADE AGREEMENTS

Since the U.S. and China have been engaged in a trade war and Beijing has frozen purchases of U.S. soybeans, the Brazilian farm sector has been booming. While much of China’s demand is for soy, which is not grown in the Amazon but in neighboring savannah grasslands known as the cerrado, those lands—also environmentally critical and vulnerable—have seen a sizable uptick in deforestation.

The Amazon, on the other hand, is predominantly deforested to raise cattle—beef that is exported to European countries in particular. While European governments have roundly condemned Bolsonaro’s actions, it hasn’t stopped consumers in Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere from chowing down on steak and burgers.

The demand for beef will only accelerate under the terms of the Mercosur, a free trade deal between the European Union and Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. While the terms of the deal have been under negotiation for the past 20 years, France and Ireland are now refusing to ratify it unless Bolsonaro takes steps to curb the rampant fires and deforestation.

BUSINESS

In Brazil, which is the world’s leading producer of beef, the largest herd of cattle belongs to JBS, the world’s largest meatpacking company, about which Amazon Watch, a California-based NGO, earlier this year issued the second edition of a report called “Complicity in Destruction,” which calls out the traders and financiers most responsible for the widespread deforestation. Among them: BlackRock, Santander, and JP Morgan Chase. Meanwhile, supermarket giants like Costco, Walmart, and Ahold Delhaize, which owns Stop & Shop, Giant, and Food Lion, are complicit through their contracts with JBS, for example.

While many businesses have made progress in eliminating deforestation from their supply chains, as the Rainforest Alliance’s Nigel Sizer explains, it’s very hard to trace. Which is why business accountability needs to work hand in hand with government regulation.

[Photo: Victor Moriyama/Getty Images]

INVESTMENT

Through their significant investment in agribusinesses, pension funds wield enormous influence on the sector. While KLP, an $80 billion Norwegian pension fund, is pressuring agribusiness companies including Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, and Cargill, for example, as well as their largest investors and banks to proactively pressure companies to end activities accelerating the destruction of the Amazon.

Julie Nash, director of the Food and Forests program at the Boston-based nonprofit group Ceres—which works with institutional investors to drive economic solutions—says that the images of the fires in the Amazon have prompted calls by investors to hold companies accountable because they are recognizing the link between deforestation and climate change and the risk it poses to business. The group recently released a statement signed by more than 200 large investors, which collectively represent $16.2 trillion in assets under management, calling for urgent action and corporate accountability.

Among the major funds missing from the signatories is BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world. While the firm’s CEO, Larry Fink, has been widely credited for calling on businesses to resist short-termism and contribute to society, according to Amazon Watch, BlackRock is among the top three shareholders in 25 of the largest publicly traded deforestation-risk companies.

A solution? Not even close. But we can spark a conversation and issue a call for a strategic, systematic, and integrated approach to conserving one of the world’s greatest natural resources, on which we all depend.

Jeffrey Hollender is CEO of the American Sustainable Business Council, the leading business policy group representing responsible businesses. He was cofounder and CEO of Seventh Generation.

Carol Goodstein is a communications consultant for socially responsible companies and organizations. She is the former director of communications and marketing for the Rainforest Alliance.

Hollender and Goodstein are currently writing a book on sustainability 2.0. 

LOST IN LANGUAGE

One reason for the disengagement over the dire state of the natural world is that the discussion has, over the past several years, dissolved into a blather of babble. That obscurity and ambiguity about what we mean when we try to talk sensibly about the environment has enabled too many of us to emotionally distance ourselves from the most terrifying issues of our time.

 Climate change: an existential crisis? Come again?

 We care about COVID because it’s tangible. Someone you know starts dry-hacking one day, lands in the ICU and is dead a week later. Boom.

 We care about the stock market. We watch it rise and fall, and when it swings low, and lower, we can feel that sucker punch to the gut.

 We care about air quality when we hear the struggled wheeze of an emphysema patient. Or we live in San Francisco and one morning, glance out our window at an eerily iridescent orange haze.

 But climate change—even when the proper term has been officially changed to those in the know to climate emergency or crisis—leaves too many people confounded. Even the converted. Ditto with biodiversity loss. The need to reduce emissions to net zero. Participate in the circular economy. Buy circular fashion. Support regenerative agriculture, regenerative business and even regenerative tourism…

 Huh?

 Do our words matter? I worry that the passion and energy is being passively plucked out of the discourse when words like sustainability take root in our lexicon, like an invasive species, and nobody except for a few eggheads at the UN or National Institute of Science, is the slightest bit confident that they know what it means. And even if they do, that their confidence as to its common meaning is woefully misplaced.

 In the old days, fifty years or so back, a fiery conflagration in Cleveland’s oil-soaked Cuyahoga River sparked a global movement. Even then-President Nixon and Congress were quickish to act, passing the EPA, the Clean Water and Clean Air acts in 1972.

 In those days, we talked in plain terms about polluted skies, melting nuclear power plants and acid rain. Not only did most people know what the heck was being discussed, but because these concepts were both intelligible and tangible, people could respond with a manageable and visceral emotional reaction other than the frozen stare and despair of hopeless angst that today’s linguistic mumbo jumbo breeds.

 In their lumpy Birkenstocks, frumpy haircuts, and unshaven body parts the passionate and well-meaning Seventies environmentalists ultimately seemed too earnest and do-gooder to many. Their message, while refreshingly straightforward, was too didactic—too Debbie downer.

 The paucity and deprivation themes and memes that defined the first phase of our environmental movement was ultimately a no-go in this country, and ultimately in many countries. (Remember cardigan-clad Jimmy Carter telling his fellow Americans to use less gas and turn down the thermostat to save energy? Not a smooth move from a purely political popularity perspective).

 In 1987, with the publication of the Bruntland Report, also known as Our Common Future, environmentalism morphed into a new more feel-good movement: sustainability. Although most people, then as now, weren’t so sure precisely what it meant, it was novel and certainly had a more hopeful and reassuring ring. "Sustainable development could meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

 What could possibly be wrong with that picture?

 Our good old American desire to move from puritanical constraint to abundance was warmly embraced by people on both sides of the aisle and country as individuals and companies sanctioned the new win-win-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too paradigm. Wealthier people in wealthier nations could feel good again about stockpiling their shopping carts high with food, using paper and producing stuff—particularly when it grew on trees in poor countries. It just needed to be harvested sustainably or responsibly or ethically.

 A whole new cadre of feel-good, do-good companies got into the act. Ben and Jerry’s, Eileen Fisher, Stonyfield Farms. They were the precursors to the B-Corp businesses, and their founders found a way to make environmentalism profitable. And they made money hand over fist—especially when they sold out to Unilever and other multinationals. Their message: consumers could help the planet by “shopping with their wallets.”

 While forward-thinking companies began to embrace sustainability, after a short while, stories of birds and butterflies and emotionally fulfilled coffee farmers didn’t hold water with their shareholders, who demanded true accountability. That’s when and why sustainability moved into the purview of the corporate bean-counters. And for a legitimate reason. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” as the euphemism goes.

 The vague term of sustainability spun off a new vocabulary, efficiently truncated to terse acronyms like CSR and ESG. Biz speak.

 Meanwhile, the science community continued to politely sound the alarm over our collective assault on the environment—tossing around terms like climate change, global warming biodiversity loss and chloroflourocarbons. Al Gore got into the action. An Inconvenient Truth. Downer. Again.

 While the science was real, the messaging—both from the scientific and the business communities—continued to be squishy. Who here can clearly define circular economy or tease apart the difference between net zero and carbon neutral? What exactly is a regenerative business? Ummmm…

 Pair a picture of migratory songbirds dropping dead mid-flight and falling from the sky by the tens of thousands next to a graph illustrating the crashing of biodiversity. As we English majors learn early on, show don’t tell. Want to know where your food comes from, other than your local Whole Foods? Google images of feedlot fed cows. You may think twice about your next burger.

 In other words, there’s just been too much telling and not enough showing. When ideas are crystal clear and in HD sharp focus, we know it and we feel their meaning viscerally.  

 It’s not only that our language has grown clinical and imprecise when it comes to the environment, it’s that the obscure syntax has given us license to distance if not utterly detach from the issues. Greta Thunberg’s public display of anger made us squirm because she challenged us to feel—not just think—our way through the issues.

 The MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements have done an inspiring job of encouraging all of us to find and hone our voice in the cultural conversation. But in any conversation, words matter.

 Just as the call for social justice and accountability has caused so many us to question our use of language—some would say to an extreme—our language around the natural world could use some more rigor, revising and even regenerating. The words we choose to use need to convey more emotional weight than what has become the euphemistic language generated and regurgitated by businesses and scientists. Out with the jargon. Time to tell it like it is, with intention, so that we stop obfuscating the truth and face it head on. Our house is on fire. The time is now.

WHY MAKE CLIMATE CHANGE A LAUGHING MATTER?

In 1896 the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius theorizes that as people burned coal and other fossil fuels, they’ll add carbon dioxide to the Earth’s atmosphere, which will raise the planet’s average temperature. 

Flash-forward to the early 1970’s and the dawn of the environmental movement: discussions of aerosol spray cans and the demise of the ozone layer. Scientific investigation and public concern builds steam.

Flash-forward another 50 or so years and here we are. Scott Pruitt, collective handwringing, and the birth of the Good Grief group, a nine step program that is the AA for climate-concerned.

And Stephen Hawking, shortly before his death, warned us that the planet is doomed. Clearly, climate change has been communications-challenged. The message has not gotten through. Just a few months ago, the NY Times published the interactive guide Climate Change is Complex. We’ve Got Answers to Your Questions. We’re still at Climate Change 101 for the masses? Time to get a move on.

Millennials care about climate change. According to the Global Shapers Annual Survey 2017 on technology, economy, values, career and governance, which surveyed more than 31,000 Millennials from over 180 countries, climate change remains their biggest global concern for the third year in a row.

So what’s not been working? This stuff is just about as scary as it gets. (If you’re really like to go for the guts, check out the Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells New York Magazine’s most widely read piece ever.

It’s a question of framing. While psychologists, journalists and behaviorists posit theories around fear or hope as the greatest motivator for action around climate change or other tough topics, I’d promote satire as a viable alternative—particularly if your organization or brand is targeting Millennials.

As John Oliver quipped in response to a poll that found 1 in 4 Americans deny the existence of climate change: “Who gives a shit? You don’t need public opinion on fact.” He then hosted what he characterized as “a mathematically representative debate on climate change” featuring a climate denier, Bill Nye the Science Guy and 95 climate scientists. Oliver’s schtick got attention: nearly 8 million You Tube views.

No guarantee that it’s a fail-safe approach to framing the issue, but funny, clever and irreverent are provocative. Funny gets noticed, shared and liked. An irreverent video on the Affordable Care Act increased web traffic by 40 percent in less than a day.

Why funny? Because it’s a conversation-starter. Which is its biggest selling point. Fear and panic lead to dread, which leads to psychological paralysis. Funny opens us up to new ideas. That’s because when we laugh, we release endorphins and dopamine—the feel-good neurotransmitters.

Funny helps us process difficult information. Scott Weems, a cognitive neuroscientist and author. In his book, Ha! The Science of When we Laugh and Why, Weems writes that humor is a “response to conflict and confusion in our brain”.

In Personality and Sense of Humor, Avner Ziv says that “comedy and satire possess a common denominator in that both try to change or reform society by means of humor. The two forms together constitute the best illustration there is of the social function of humor.”

So while you’re debating the pros and cons of framing the conversation using fear, facts or funny, check out a few of the go-to sources of Millennial information and inspiration:

 John Oliver’s roundtable with Bill Nye the Science Guy;

Funny or Die’s PSA on climate change denial disorder;

The group 350 Australia fake coal ad;

And Too Hot to Handle, a farcical multi-media series “taking a lighter look at the dark problem of climate change” supported by Ben & Jerry’s.

And if you decide that funny is too risky or doesn’t resonate for you or your brand, you could try taking a different tack: up close and personal. Next blog.

WHY SUSTAINABILITY MESSAGING IS IN NEED OF REFORMATION

Grim doesn’t begin to describe First Reformed, Paul Schrader’s new movie about Reverend Ernst Toller’s awakening to the tyranny of corporate polluters. The desperately deflated, alcoholic Toller, played by Ethan Hawke, takes a job in a 250 year-old church in the bleak bowels of upstate New York. Among his very few congregants is a young environmental activist, whose despair over the state of the world catapults the psychologically vulnerable pastor into a state of even more dire desperation.

As Toller leaves his monastically furnished bedroom, enters the spartan bathroom, where a single, blazingly bare bulb sheds light on his stream of bloody urine, my husband whispers, “Great SNL material.”

Maybe it’s us—the movie did earn rave reviews— but enough already. Unrelenting, unforgiving and unapologetically bleak messaging around climate change and other apocalyptic scenarios is a stifling turn-off.

From a communications POV, it’s exactly what’s been wrong and stays wrong—with enviro messaging. IT’S TOO EARNEST.

I’m not suggesting that Schrader should have made a comedy or that the New York Times lighten up articles on efforts to open the Arctic National Refuge to oil and gas exploration with a few one-liners.  

But does it always have to be so serious, especially when you’re selling stuff? Unless we lighten up the tone, stash away the Birkenstocks (okay, they’re ugly chic now), and start to laugh once in a while, we continue to preach to the converted and fail to give our audience good reasons to like, share, tweet, buy or donate.

A recent study conducted by Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and the Environmental Defense Fund demonstrates that humor is effective in motivating audiences to take action around climate change. For Pathways of Influence in Emotional Appeals: Benefits and Tradeoffs of Using Fear or Humor to Promote Climate Change-Related Intentions and Risk Perceptions, researchers partnered with Second City Works, a marketing offshoot of the improvisational theater troupe to produce a series of online videos featuring a weatherman forecasting weather patterns caused by climate change. The three videos, each with a different tone, ended with the same call to action: “Find out what your local officials and the presidential candidates think about climate change. Have your voice heard on Nov. 8.” The conclusion: the video that made people laugh more motivated to action.

To be fair, although the study shows that humor can be an effective means to inspire young people to pursue climate change activism, fear proved to be an equally effective motivator.

The point, though, is that there is room for laughter, particularly if you’re targeting Millenials. I understand that rising sea levels and extreme weather events are not laugh-your-guts-out funny. But light-heartedness makes issues—even doomsday scenarios—accessible. It breaks taboos. It lightens the mood. It doesn’t need to imply that your organization or company is making a mockery of melting ice caps.

According Jeff Niederdeppe, associate professor of communication at Cornell University, who oversaw the study: "Young people buy green products, they believe in climate change, they're worried about it, but they're not as politically active on the issue as older generations are. And if you look at where Millennials get news information, it's from John Oliver and Trevor Noah.”

So what can organizations and businesses do to inspire social change through satire? Stay tuned for Blog Post Number 2.