In the last two years, the language companies use to talk about sustainability has shifted more than the sustainability work itself has. Research tracking S&P 100 sustainability reports found the share using the term “ESG” dropped sharply between 2023 and 2024, down to about a quarter of companies from roughly forty percent. Meanwhile, the substance mostly held: multiple surveys running through 2025 and into 2026 put the share of companies maintaining or increasing their actual sustainability investment in the 85 to 90 percent range. The programs didn’t disappear. The words did.
That gap matters because of what it reveals. A message built on moral framing, this is the right thing to do, doing our part, protecting the planet for future generations, is a message about values. Values are exactly what became contested and politically exposed over the past few years, so when the environment shifted, that framing was the first thing companies pulled. And once it’s pulled, there’s often nothing structural left behind it, because the case was never built on anything the business needed independent of the politics around it.
Materiality-anchored language doesn’t have that problem, because it was never actually about values in the first place. A message about energy cost exposure, supply chain resilience, regulatory compliance, or asset risk is true regardless of who holds office or what’s fashionable in a given year. It’s also, not coincidentally, the language procurement teams, lenders, and insurers already use, which means it survives contact with an audience that was never going to be persuaded by a moral appeal in the first place.
Going quiet isn’t a neutral alternative, either. Companies that pull back public sustainability communication while continuing the underlying work, a pattern now common enough to have its own name, trade a visible risk for a slower, structural one: weaker stakeholder trust, tighter access to capital, and lost contracts when a buyer asks for credentials a supplier has quietly stopped sharing. A recent industry survey found a striking share of businesses had already lost contract opportunities specifically because they couldn’t produce sustainability information when asked. Silence doesn’t remove the exposure, it just changes its shape.
The fix isn’t louder moral messaging or careful silence, it’s translation: describe the same real work in terms of what it protects and what it costs to ignore, instead of what it stands for. A heat pump upgrade isn’t a statement about the planet, it’s a hedge against energy price volatility and a maintenance cost reduction. A supplier diversity program isn’t a values statement, it’s a supply chain resilience measure. The action doesn’t change. The sentence describing it does, and that sentence is what survives a change in administration, a change in board composition, or a change in what’s socially safe to say out loud.
That’s the translation work sustainability communication should be doing right now, not deciding whether to talk about sustainability, but rebuilding the case in terms sturdy enough to survive the next change in the weather. Find the materiality that was already there, and let the message rest on that instead of on the mood of the market.