The rise and rise of greenhushing

The new Net Zero Report from carbon and offset consultancy South Pole suggests that we seem to be in a post-greenwashing world. The report draws on insights in 2023 from 1,400 senior global sustainability professionals at large climate conscious companies about their climate commitments, risks, solutions and progress towards net zero. The report finds that climate action is alive and kicking in the leading businesses, with 83% of those surveyed having set net zero targets and 76% having increased their net zero budgets. In 2022, 67% said that they were on track to meet net zero targets, increasing to 81% in 2023. 

However, despite this good news, companies are increasingly reluctant to talk about it. As the report states, even the greenest companies are greenhushing and not publicising their achievements. 58% of the companies are decreasing communications on climate issues, with 44% saying that external comms on targets has become more difficult in the past year and 18% not planning to publicise their science-based targets at all. The report argues that climate leaders being unwilling to communicate climate action out of fear of attack gives laggards the cover to carry on stalling on meaningful change. Companies taking genuine action should be confident to communicate success and lessons learned, encouraging others to do the same.    

The latest Know the Chain benchmarking of labour rights action in the global apparel and footwear sector finds that companies remain largely reactive to human rights violations rather than developing and demonstrating robust embedded human rights and environmental due diligence practices designed to prevent abuse. Moreover, despite such violations being endemic in the sector, companies routinely fail to remedy problems when they occur. Many companies were scored very poorly in the benchmark. 

However, there were some glimmers of light. Know the Chain says the top performers demonstrate how strong commitment to stakeholder engagement, human rights and due diligence, and provision of remedy when things go wrong is entirely possible with a healthy financial bottom line. The benchmark highlights Lululemon and Puma as posting top scores on human rights performance while reporting strong financial results.  Clearly prioritising worker protections is both possible and profitable. 

The UK’s biggest power station, Drax, in Yorkshire, has been granted permission to develop carbon capture and storage technology for two of its six generating units. The power station was originally coal fired but has converted to run on biomass over the past decade. Controversially this switch has meant the power station has been eligible for billions of pounds of subsidy – some estimates put this at over £780m a year between 2018 and 2022. Drax says that the carbon capture units will remove 95% of emissions – amounting to some 8m tonnes of CO2 annually – over a 20-year working lifespan. 

The UK government’s biomass strategy, announced in August 2023, states that subsidy for biomass power stations without carbon capture and storage will end in 2027. However with the technology in place, and considering fluctuating feed stock prices, some estimates put the total subsidy for the Drax power station as high as £43bn should it operate for another 25 years. The UK government has expressed a hope that with the new technology in place the power station will be carbon negative over this lifecycle. 

The news that 2023 was the hottest year ever came as little surprise. The planet was 1.48C hotter than pre-industrial times on average last year, meaning we will almost certainly break through the 1.5C target set under the 2015 Paris agreement. Scientists won’t consider the target broken until temperatures are consistently above 1.5C but it’s surely only a matter of time.

 Data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service puts temperatures at 0.17C higher in 2023 than in 2016, the previous record year. Another record set was that 2023 was the first year in which every day was at least 1C warmer than pre-industrial averages. The EU scientists say that the results demonstrate dramatically how far the world is from that in which human civilisation developed, and that 2023’s temperatures were likely to have exceeded any of the period of the past 100,000 years. 

The UN’s annual report on global economic prospects predicts relatively low global growth of 2.4% in 2024, slowing from 2.7% in 2023, and trending below the pre-pandemic average of 3.0%. Poor post pandemic economic bounce back combined with climate related risks and potential damage are cited as determining factors alongside global conflicts such as those in Ukraine and the Middle East. Such divisions, the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres warns, are preventing effective international response to climate change and other global crises. 

Guterres has called for further progress, building on that made in 2023, towards a sustainable development goals stimulus of at least $500bn per year in affordable long-term financing for investments in sustainable development and climate action.