Sustainability leadership has accumulated considerable technical infrastructure – disclosure frameworks, lifecycle assessments, reporting standards – but has not matched it with equivalent narrative capability. The result is a growing stock of technically sound information that is increasingly well-governed and decreasingly well-communicated.
The Weinreb Group’s 2025 Chief Sustainability Officer Report describes sustainability leadership as having shifted from predominantly technical work toward persuasion, gaining trust, executive presence, translating complexity, and designing institutional change. That shift in what the role demands has not been matched by a shift in how sustainability information is typically communicated. With Australian Accounting Standards Board (AASB) S2 climate disclosure phased in from 1 January 2025 for the first group of entities, and extending to further groups across the following two financial years, climate risk is now a board-level legal matter. Technical compliance is being secured. The ability to make its implications felt by the people who bear governance responsibility for them is a different problem – and it remains largely unsolved.
The Credibility Trap
Sustainability professionals think in decades but often treat narrative as a liability. Greenwashing scandals have made ‘storytelling’ feel dangerous, so many teams retreat to what’s safest to defend. A 2023 survey by the Nürnberg Institute for Market Decisions found that 22 per cent of companies refrain from communicating sustainability progress for fear of greenwashing accusations – a dynamic commonly called greenhushing. Choosing silence has a certain institutional logic. It’s just not a particularly effective one. Under that pressure, practitioners default to data tables, proof points and technical language that verify but rarely connect.
Sustainability communications professional Matthew Campelli uses a Burger King campaign – first surfaced by strategist Julian Cole – to make the case for reframing what responsible sustainability communication actually looks like. Burger King recognised that customers wanted indulgent burgers but associated fast food with poor quality and health concerns. It ran adverts showing its restaurants on fire to underline the flame-grilling process, reframing a consumer tension rather than ignoring it. Campelli draws the parallel to ESG: sustainability teams want to acknowledge audience ambivalence, yet fear that anything resembling a narrative will be read as spin, so they retreat into communications that prove but do not persuade.
Drawing on a Harvard Business Review article co-authored by Kim Grob, MFA, and Vivian S. Lee, MD, PhD, MBA, Campelli points to a way through. Facts alone build credibility but not connection to the ‘why’; stories add context, humanity and empathy; evidence-backed narrative builds both. He proposes reframing sustainability storytelling as contextual communication – narrative anchored in solid proof rather than wishful claims. That distinction matters because the trap’s real cost isn’t reputational caution. It’s a steady accumulation of technically verified information that nobody acts on.
What Animals Know About Communication
Tay’s account of Punch’s story isolates three principles that animal-centred narratives apply almost automatically. First, the story rests on emotional anchoring: a young animal seeking comfort triggers recognition before any conscious processing of the issue. Second, the IKEA orangutan introduced cultural bridging – a household object most audiences already know transformed niche zoo content into something personally relatable. Together, these two moves brought a specialist story into general circulation without requiring any reduction in the seriousness of the underlying subject.
Tay’s third lesson concerns tone. Punch’s coverage shifted from eliciting pity to highlighting his strength and socialisation, moving the story from helplessness toward resilience. Climate communication research supports the same direction. A study by Saffron O’Neill and Sophie Nicholson-Cole found that dramatic, fearful climate imagery can distance and disempower audiences rather than motivate them, while a meta-analysis by Melanie Tannenbaum and colleagues shows that fear appeals become more effective when paired with efficacy messages. The pattern is consistent: audiences who feel overwhelmed and without agency tend to withdraw, not engage. Resilience framing does not soften the threat. It gives audiences a role in responding to it.
These three mechanics – emotional anchoring, cultural bridging and resilience framing – are not marketing tricks. They determine whether a sustainability message registers as distant information or as something people feel implicated in. Most sustainability communications are designed to withstand scrutiny. Fewer are designed to produce a response. When those mechanics are absent, the most technically sound disclosure can remain perfectly correct and entirely inert.
Reframing as a Leadership Act
Language choices shape how responsibility is perceived. An analysis by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at the University of Technology Sydney examined newspaper coverage of carbon policy and found that ‘tax’ framing dominated over ‘price’ language. The project’s director, Professor Wendy Bacon, observed that “This framing of the issue as a ‘tax’ tended to encourage a perception that the policy was aimed at individual consumers rather than large companies.” A mechanism designed to target large emitters was heard, by many, as a personal impost – which meant the public debate about who bore the burden arrived at the wrong answer before the policy details were even considered.
Kate Dundas leads the UN Global Compact Network Australia – the Australian arm of the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative – working to help businesses translate responsible business principles into commercially durable action. In her conversations with companies across banking, finance, property and FMCG, she observes that boards remain preoccupied with short-term regulatory and market pressures. That preoccupation is not simply a boardroom personality trait; it reflects the credibility trap in institutional form, where technically sound disclosure that fails to surface the longer-term interdependencies between business performance and ecosystem health makes minimum compliance look like the rational choice.
Her support for Australia’s bid to co-host COP31 with Pacific Island nations shows how reframing operates at scale. Elevating nature as a strategic climate priority becomes more concrete when backed by Australia’s National Ecosystem Accounts and by tangible examples – mangrove restoration, urban green spaces that cool suburbs and reduce flood risk – that give the economic value of ecosystems a human address. Her commentary on Intrepid Travel’s global agreement with the UN Global Compact similarly demonstrates how supply-chain partnerships can be told as stories of identifiable businesses and communities rather than high-level commitments with no recognisable face.
Dundas argues that minimum compliance will not secure the communities and ecosystems that business performance ultimately depends on, because it leaves the underlying interdependence unarticulated. The technical ESG framework determines what an organisation is accountable for; what remains missing – at board level and below – is the narrative capability to translate that accountability into something decision-makers actually feel implicated by, rather than merely informed of.
The Practitioner Dimension
Australian Securities and Investments Commission guidance on avoiding greenwashing treats sustainability-related claims as a market-integrity issue, not just a reputational one. It warns that misrepresenting how green a product, strategy or target is can mislead investors, particularly where future goals are promoted without reasonable grounds. ASIC chair Joe Longo states the consequence directly: “when companies make misleading statements about ESG issues, it erodes trust in the market – and can lead to the misallocation of capital.” Sustainability narrative is therefore not an adjunct to governance; it is subject to the same substantiation requirements as any other market-facing claim.
That standard – reasonable grounds, adequate qualification for future-matter claims – defines the evidentiary floor that sustainability advisory work must operate above if it is to protect rather than expose the organisations it supports. Monique Chelin, a Brisbane-based sustainability consultant and board director who founded MJC Sustainability and has served as an Ambassador for Opportunity International Australia since 2010, advises clients across mining, infrastructure, government and major capital projects on ESG risk, reporting and stakeholder engagement. Her practice centres on translating disclosure and governance obligations into board-relevant language and structured engagement so that sustainability is treated as a decision-making concern rather than a communications exercise.
Her children’s book Enzo Finds His Friends demonstrates that translation skill in a different medium. Centred on Enzo, a small puppy who leaves his dog family, arrives at his forever home and sets out to make friends in a new environment, the book explores friendship, belonging, kindness, acceptance and not judging others by appearances. A dog’s perspective carries those values more naturally than most organisational statements – and that’s not incidental, it’s the mechanism. A character with immediate emotional legibility makes responsibility accessible before the reader has had time to raise their defences. Author profits are donated to RSPCA Australia, anchoring the empathy the story generates to a verifiable and specific outcome.
The same translation capability underpins Chelin’s consulting work and the Enzo narrative: turning abstract responsibility into language and images that audiences can act on. When that capability is absent – and the ASIC guidance and Longo’s remarks make clear that this is an assessed, regulated domain – the cost runs deeper than missed persuasion. It erodes the market trust that is a precondition for capital to reach the investments and decisions that actually matter.
Closing the Narrative Gap
Every sustainability framework, disclosure standard and lifecycle assessment is ultimately a claim made to human beings about what matters and who is responsible. The technical infrastructure to support those claims has advanced rapidly. The narrative infrastructure has not kept pace. Under AASB S2, Australian boards carry legal duties around climate disclosure, but a technically compliant report that fails to make its stakes felt is unlikely to produce the quality of governance that regulation exists to secure.
Treating narrative as optional is a structural risk, not a cosmetic preference. Campelli’s framing of contextual communication captures the discipline required: combine verifiable information with human meaning rather than treating them as alternatives. Tay’s three mechanics – emotional anchoring, cultural bridging and resilience framing – offer a practical frame for doing so, whether the context is a community consultation, a board paper on physical climate risk, or an investor briefing. A disclosure that applies these principles is more likely to produce an informed response than one that presents compliance data in isolation.
Stories reach people when they anchor large stakes in recognisable emotions and leave room for the audience to see their own role in the outcome. The remaining distance between disclosure and action is not a data gap but a narrative one. Boards that treat it as someone else’s communications problem are quietly ensuring that technically compliant reporting produces no meaningful oversight at all.
