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By Richard Davis, CEO and Co-Founder of 51toCarbonZero.com
There is a strange paradox playing out right now. Companies are continuing to invest in decarbonisation, setting targets, measuring emissions, and working through the hard operational problems of getting to net zero. And yet they are talking about it less, much less.
This phenomenon has a name. The Economist recently called it “the remarkable rise of greenhushing”. Unlike greenwashing, which involves companies overclaiming environmental credentials they do not have, greenhushing is the opposite problem: companies with genuine progress to report going deliberately quiet about it.
The rise of greenhushing is part of a wider trend I wrote about in the Carbon Herald earlier this year, tracking how the phrase “net zero” had largely disappeared from the national press even as corporate commitments continued to grow. Between 2023 and 2024, there was a 32% decrease in the use of “net zero” across the UK and North American national press and mentions of greenwashing fell from around 10,000 to around 6,000. The media silence is significant in itself. But the corporate silence now runs alongside it, and that is a more serious problem.
Greenhushing is not new, but it has evolved. The first wave, which emerged at the start of this decade, came from a reasonable fear: if you make a public claim about your sustainability credentials, someone will pick holes in it. An NGO, a journalist, a competitor. It was caution born from a real risk, greenwashing accusations caused genuine reputational damage, and organisations responded by saying less.
The second wave that we live in is more corrosive. It is not driven by fear of scrutiny. It is driven by political and consumer polarisation, particularly in the US, where terms like “ESG”, “climate change” and “net zero” have become charged language in themselves. A South Pole study found that 81% of companies globally recognised that communicating their net zero goals was beneficial to their bottom line, yet 58% admitted to green hushing anyway. The instinct to go quiet is understandable. It is also, I think, a serious strategic miscalculation.
The action has not stopped
The most important thing to say about the current moment is this: corporate climate action is not stalling. The silence in the media does not reflect what is actually happening.
By January 2026, the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), the leading international body for verifying corporate decarbonisation strategies, had validated net-zero targets for over 10,000 companies, marking a significant milestone in the global net-zero transformation. This is a nearly 40% increase year on year. Companies adopting both near-term and net zero SBTi targets grew by 61% over the same period. A 2025 EcoVadis report found that, despite the current US political environment, companies were quietly maintaining or boosting sustainability investments, with 65% viewing supply chain sustainability as a competitive advantage.
The work is continuing. What is changing is the willingness to say so publicly. That gap, between action and communication, is where brand trust quietly erodes.
The journey is the point
There is a category error at the heart of how many organisations approach sustainability communication, and it is worth naming it.
Traditional brand communications are built around a simple premise: the product is ready, it works, and you should buy it. The brand exists to project confidence, completeness and give a recognisable personality to the product. Acknowledging uncertainty or imperfection is a liability.
Sustainability communications are structurally different. Organisations are attempting to address problems of planetary scale, across value chains they do not fully control, using methodologies that are still evolving, against a regulatory backdrop that shifts year on year. Nobody solving a problem of that complexity gets it right on day one. The honest question is not whether the company is perfect. It is whether ambition is genuine, progress is real and whether it is being reported accurately.
That reframe matters because the journey, and all its imperfections, is not a liability to be concealed. It is the story.
Why silence is not safety
Pulling back on ESG communication does not neutralise the risk of talking about it. It creates a different and harder risk: the absence of a story that others will fill. Competitors who keep communicating build relationships with sustainability leads, with procurement teams, with investors, while those who go quiet do not. Customers who care, and the data consistently shows that a substantial proportion do, draw their own conclusions from silence.
At 51toCarbonZero, we work with organisations across multiple sectors, using our technology to disclose their carbon footprint with precision, deliver world-class transition plans and engage all stakeholders along the journey.
The companies that keep communicating through this period, those that narrate the journey, own the difficult bits, and maintain the ambition, are the ones that will have a credible story and build trust. The ones that go quiet are simply eroding their brand equity.