Communicating sustainability when the mood has changed

If you work in sustainability comms, you will have noticed that the mood has drastically changed and become a lot more hostile. This isn't a new development, but is increasingly more blatant. This week, I read in an interesting analysis from the London School of Economics Grantham Research Institute that even respectable UK newspapers are increasingly carrying critical and even oppositional narratives about climate change policies, signalling that resistance to traditional climate messaging is finding its way into mainstream coverage.

Sometimes it’s met with visible scepticism; other times with polite disengagement. And increasingly, with alarming apathy.

That doesn’t mean the work itself is failing. But it does mean the communications approach has to adapt.

Climate and sustainability communications now sit against a very different backdrop to even a few years ago: cost-of-living pressures, political polarisation, growing distrust of corporate claims and fatigue with long-term targets and abstract ambition all play out in ways that directly affect how messages are being perceived.

Narratives that once felt progressive and credible can now be seen as disconnected, or even inflammatory, depending on the audience. Ignoring that shift weakens both the story and the impact.

I don’t think that the majority of the pushback is ideological; the distrust is rooted in urgency and targets without visible pathways, values-led messaging that assumes shared belief, and ambition framed as inevitability rather than intent. The question for most isn’t whether climate change matters, but how it fits into people’s realities. And when communication fails to acknowledge those tensions, people switch off or oppose.

What’s needed is good judgement on tone and timing, relevance and resonance. Treating scepticism as ignorance, or in itself ignoring it, isn’t the answer. Instead, what’s important is anchoring sustainability to the realities people are facing and matching the language to the audience, who are highly alert to performative language and over-polished narratives, not the strategy document.

Highlighting long-term benefits and outcomes in context, such as cost stability, energy security and health and wellbeing, is more effective and more credible than leading with net zero itself.

Sustainability communications is harder than it was five years ago. That doesn’t make it less important. It makes it more deliberate, and it needs to be more nuanced than ever before.