Shownotes

Did you know that we are already two years, into the 'Decade of Action' - which calls for accelerating sustainable solutions to meet the SDGs. This is the decade of reporting, on where we are; what we have achieved; and what still needs to be done as we race towards the finish line. Also, there is increased scrutiny on the contribution or lack of by multinational enterprises in achieving the SDGs; the side projects which are great PR but not much else...... 

My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast, this week Blanca Civit Sarda from the World Benchmarking Alliance talks about sustainability and sustainability communications. We also spoke about........

👉🏾 The importance of understanding the science and language around sustainability 

👉🏾 Green washing, blue washing, rainbow washing....The proliferation of misinformation and challenges it creates for addressing real issues around environment and sustainability

👉🏾 The UK Green Claims Code 

👉🏾 The challenge of breaking through the noise and sifting through the monumental data overload for impact

👉🏾 The intrinsic link between inclusion and sustainability for a 'Just Transition'

👉🏾 Why collective purpose and collective action are critical to achieving the SDGs....

We also spoke about Blanca's journey, the challenges she faced with Dutch or English not being her first language as she worked in different countries; her take on leadership and advice to aspiring women leaders. 

What she said really resonated with me, especially this one 

'Speak out, don't stay silent because you don't change the world by staying silent'

Memorable Passages from the episode

👉🏾 Thank you. Thanks for your time and this interview. 

👉🏾 So I'm originally from Reus, a small city in Catalonia, not so far from Barcelona.I was born and raised there and studied there. Also at my university, I studied a bachelor's in journalism and one in advertising and then later a masters in corporate communications and PR, public relations for the ones who hear PR. And I do work now at the World Benchmarking Alliance as the communications and earned media lead, being part of the communications team but also taking care of the press office.

And my background is in public relations but also journalism, different sectors; corporate sector, financial sector across the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Spain. So quite a pan-European focused experience on mainly the corporate sector. And now I work in a nonprofit, so the World Bench Marking Alliance is a nonprofit organisation that looks at incentivising companies into taking action towards sustainable development goals and sustainability in general. So it's very interesting what communicating sustainability can be about.

👉🏾 Well, first it's important to define what sustainability means in the context of your own communications role. And that depends a lot on whether you represent another company or an investor a nonprofit or a government project. And I worked for all of them and I can assure you that these are all four very different ways of communicating sustainability. Maybe one will require more proactive media campaigns, for example, or another will focus on consumers or risk and crisis communications. So sustainability is also a very broad and complex topic. So I think the most important is that you believe in the project that you represent and have passion for it. And I think you will need that because once you specialise, for example, in the environment or human rights, you need to be very ready to read lots of research, follow very closely your policy and regulatory developments, monitor certain issues in the news and social media, and that at a certain speed. 

👉🏾 So, we're living in a decade of delivery of the sustainable development goals and as a consequence, there's a lot of reporting, a lot of talk and often a lack of agreement too. So When I talk to my communications colleagues, we'll agree that our job requires a lot of learning new concepts, understanding science, especially around climate, lots of UN jargon, lots of acronyms, you know, ESG, CSR, SBTI, COP. So a useful skill to have here is the ability to keep things simple, both from a language and visual perspective and avoid using words like net zero or carbon negative, or eco-friendly, in your marketing materials without even knowing or doing your research first. When communicating sustainability, you're likely also to work with lots of data and research and often one needs to translate complex information into something appealing, and it has a lot to do a thing with the ability to learn, understand, and filter out what works for your audiences, so you can make a real impact. 

👉🏾 Yeah. So I think the main challenge for us when you work, for example, with lots of data and research around sustainability, is that you really need to have skill to identify what's relevant in there. What's relevant for your audiences from a communications perspective, but also to translate how these audiences will receive or understand sustainability or what you're trying to communicate. So I think for us definitely our main challenge is like from all the noise and all the amount of data that there is out there, some data is of course facts and scientific; climate, for example climate scientific data. But others could be fake news on social media. So how do you differentiate from all that noise and how do you focus on the message and the impact that you want to create with your different channels in that case. So that's I think, one of the key ones, and I think that connects very well with what we're seeing these days, which is a lot of greenwashing.

👉🏾 Yes. I think your own media channels such as a website or your own social media channels are important to communicate and to really land a message that you have. But I do think that media, like traditional media has shifted also the focus towards reporting more sustainability. Being more sceptical about company pledges for example, covering more big sustainability events like the one we saw in Glasgow last year COP. I think there is a space, it's just that sometimes the way it works the industry of media at the moment, it needs to focus a lot on the headlines and the urgency and the click baits and that's how they survive. But sometimes there's not enough space in mainstream media to actually get into the detail of the issues. And that's how some companies and marketing gurus take advantage of that landing greenwashing. 

👉🏾 If we look at the past two to three years, we reached a point that we see lots of companies practicing not only greenwashing, but also now there is blue washing, rainbow washing, et cetera. So the first and oldest danger of greenwashing is misleading consumers. Individuals are starting to understand that a product with a green logo or recycled packaging doesn't mean that it's better for the planet or for your health. So in short, I see a huge gray area right now with companies using lots of smoke and mirror techniques, sophisticated language that sounds scientific. 

👉🏾 That needs to stop and it needs urgent regulation. For example, we've seen the recently in the UK about the Green Claims Code that it's going to punish fashion brands for false eco claims. Another danger of greenwashing for companies is the backlash that they can receive from a PR perspective. If their communications are too ambitious and creative to celebrate milestones, but the company actually doesn't walk the talk. For example, having fundamentals in place like a proper strategy, with actionable goals or being transparent and ethical, that is very damaging. 

👉🏾 And media and journalists are great at spotting these gaps, and they have an important role educating both the public and the actual company leaders in this. But also as a consequence, what I see is that for every good company that's actually doing good out there, there will be five more companies, with press releases full of greenwashing. So in the end, the company or heroes, let's call it like that, they don't really get the praise or the attention they deserve. However, I think the most dangerous part of greenwashing is about the fact that in the end, none of it helps our planet and our people. And there is research out there showing us that greenwashing has a greater societal and environmental costs beyond the misleading of consumers. So in the end, all this cloud of noise threatens the actual progress and real action that we urgently need.

👉🏾 Well, that depends a lot on individual, but I believe that purpose is very important. Like I do value companies with purpose and I do believe that in the future we will see more of that and it has shifted already. Sadly, we live in a capitalist world where the majority of the companies - their purpose of course is to make a profit to benefit from something from the sales. But I do see a change and I wouldn't say that change is necessarily driven by consumers, but definitely, the newer generations are aware of the impact of companies in the world. Therefore they already demanding, for example, more sustainable products at all levels, right? You would like sustainable clothes and sustainable or ecological food or have even sustainable investments. 

👉🏾 So, of course, the consumer angle is important to get companies to have more purpose. But I think what we've seen now and where it's getting dangerous, that the companies identified that that's the need, therefore, shifting towards that behaviour and what we've seen, of course, consumers have power but I think that's not enough.

I think you also need companies to have a purpose, to have a better society and planet but also you do need governments to apply the real regulation that will also drive change and I think having purpose is probably not enough to fix the world, that was probably the point that I wanted to make.

👉🏾 Having a purpose is probably not enough to fix the world. And by that I mean that a company can have a great mission to build a better world, but it needs to go together with accountability and action in order to achieve it. So the problem that we are facing at the moment is that there aren't any mechanisms in place to hold companies accountable. So without that accountability, that talk is cheap and all these pledges turn into greenwashing. 

👉🏾 So how do you get there? Well I think first all the business leaders of these big influential companies, for example, they need to be the ones leading the change. Because if they truly want to fix the world, as they say, they already have the power and the resources for it. And of course, as a consumer, you can also decide from which companies you want to buy and investors can do the same at a larger scale. 

👉🏾 Governments can also help creating the appropriate regulation and NGOs and media can also act as watchdogs. So what you need in the end is a collective purpose and a collective action towards the same direction otherwise, we're going to get lost in the process it will be too late by then and of course, that can sound utopic but we are really starting to see solutions, reports, there's data, regulation, frameworks, standards, you name it; they all hint us that we can get there if we can agree on the basics, but it will be a long slow and painful race probably. And one thing that's what gives me hope that if there's one thing that the COVID pandemic showed us, Is that if we get enough time, money, and powerful people to agree on something, we can find a solution for it.

👉🏾 Yes. The World Benchmarking Alliance, just for context, we try to identify the 2000 most influential companies that will actually make a difference. So from all these 2000 companies, we've seen examples of companies that are changing we start talking to them and they actually engage and interested in making a difference. But also, we can see with our data who are the ones who are not doing it well. But just to be truly independent and not get into these 2000 companies, I'm going to name a couple that perhaps motivate me to do my job and that I really admire their communications.

👉🏾 So the first and one of the companies/brands that incentivise me to get into sustainability was Lush Cosmetics based in the UK. I think they have done a great job from animal rights perspective taking care of their social operations, everything around Lush has to be ethical. So they're not benchmarked in our work. So but I really admire them. I think Patagonia is also doing a great job from an organisational operations perspective, communication story towards investors, but also the communications and projects that they do around consumers recycling. So I really admire their work too, from a communications perspective.

👉🏾 Yeah, that's a very good question. And it's also difficult because in order to communicate authenticity, you just need to be authentic and you just need to believe it have not only passion or purpose, but just generally walk the talk and do what you say.

So I think that's the main difference, right? Between the companies who are actively communicating sustainability well, because they are sustainable. It's not only about the communications part, that's just the last part I would say. And the ones who do greenwashing, who actually just spend the budget that they could spend with sustainability project to decarbonise, for example and they just spend that money in marketing to create a great campaign to celebrate they planted 1000 trees.

So it's just down to very a basic skill which is just being honest, and if you're working in an organisation that, you do see that there's no transparency, no honesty, go and ask questions to your managers or to your board. 

👉🏾 It's just not down to any particular skills. I think it's just generally that your company or your organisation and embeds whatever sustainability means to them, into the whole core of their operations, of their leadership, of their employees and only with that, then you can have a successful sustainability campaign, I think. 

👉🏾 We are currently facing an incredibly challenging environment to fight misinformation because opinion started to overpower information and the truth and facts. So it's scary to think that a viral tweet of a random guy can now have more impact than an editorial column of a journalist who has been in the profession for 20 years. So it's really impossible to blame one single person on that, because both journalist and communications professionals can be the problem and the solution of misinformation. 

👉🏾 In order to address the challenge, I think the effort must be collective and it starts by being skeptical and always asking questions. Educate yourself and learn from quality sources. And you can also choose to engage only with professional and verified journalists if you are a communications professional, but also do your research first and check for example who's financing that publication or look for quality independent publications who contrast their sources and use data, independent data, from different organisations. 

👉🏾 For example when I look at my PR approach, I always try to also strive for quality over quantity. So I always prefer to chat with only two expert journalists maybe, who are really eager to analyse and even question, the facts that I'm telling them. And I prefer that than over a hundred bots or journalists sometimes, who just copy paste a press release into their website. I think there's enough information overload and the first who can stop that are communications professionals and being mindful about how you communicate, the language you use and how that could be read or translated. So before also drafting a press release, I will always try to challenge my team and my colleagues saying, "Hey, is that really necessary?"

👉🏾 Yes, definitely. So we've been studying that actually, The World Benchmarking Alliance as my colleague Natasha, she was in one of your previous episodes talking about the concept of 'Just Transition.' And 'Just Transition' is just purely that, that sustainability or climate, because I think most of the people relate the word sustainability to climate communications. That is absolutely linked to the effect on people, so people and planet go together. Any disaster that you see right now in the world, It's most likely to impact more on a part of the society or a geography that are more disadvantaged. And any, for example, decarbonisation efforts that you make, it's going to have an impact on that local community or the workers of a factory.

👉🏾 So it always has consequences, and for us, I think the way we see it, it's even broader than that. It's not only about the climate change and the social aspect of it, but we really see that there is a very urgent need for a whole transformation at a systems level. So we're talking about, re-shifting what's happening in the financial world, what's happening in the tech digital world that is allowing us to have internet right now. The food system, that it also involves a lot of taking care of the land biodiversity, nature, it's all linked together. So we can't solve a climate problem or a human rights problem without having the rest working in place and that's the main challenge of the century probably. 

👉🏾 I think leaders need to listen to people. And I think in the past, I don't know, I think it depends also what do you consider a leader? What's the definition of a leader, right? Often at least represented in media and in the communications context, you would see, leaders represented in tech industries, probably billionaires, probably famous people who are really loud, out there with lots of different channels.

👉🏾 But I think people forget that leadership and leaders are everywhere, not necessarily only the ones you see in the media. And I think it would be wrong to assume that every leader has to be like the ones that represented as a mainstream. So anybody can be a leader, regardless your power, regardless your influence, could be a leader in a small team of four or you could be a leader for a whole country.

👉🏾 So at the end of the day, I think for me...