Marybeth Collins
For the past two or three years, a meaningful number of companies made a deliberate communications choice: say less about sustainability. Not because their programs were weak, but because the regulatory uncertainty, the litigation environment, and the reputational risk of being accused of greenwashing made visible commitment feel more dangerous than silence.
Greenhushing — the deliberate downplaying or withholding of environmental goals and progress — became a recognizable corporate posture.
According to the latest data from the South Pole 2024/2025 Net Zero Reports, the practice of “greenhushing”—intentionally keeping climate goals private—has intensified significantly. While the 2022/23 report found 25% of companies stayed quiet, the most recent findings indicate that the majority of surveyed companies across 9 of 14 major sectors are now intentionally decreasing their climate communications.
Companies that had genuine environmental programs stopped talking about them publicly. Companies that had committed to targets stopped mentioning them in investor presentations. The calculation was straightforward: the risk of saying too much outweighed the benefit of transparency.
That calculation is no longer accurate.
The regulatory environment has evolved — in Europe, the UK, and across U.S. states — in ways that make strategic silence a distinct legal and commercial risk. And the commercial environment has evolved in ways that make the absence of an environmental narrative a procurement and investor relations liability, not a neutral position.
Regulators Are Now Looking at What Companies Aren’t Saying
The shift that matters most is this: the regulatory frameworks that emerged to address greenwashing weren’t written narrowly. They address omissions as well as false claims.
The EU’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive prohibits environmental claims that mislead consumers — but the guidance is explicit that misleading omissions fall within its scope. Where the absence of relevant environmental information creates a false impression about a product or company’s environmental profile, that silence can constitute a violation. The directive applies to commercial communications, which regulators have interpreted broadly to include corporate website content, investor materials, and sustainability reports that influence purchasing decisions.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority published updated supply chain guidance in January 2026 that addresses this directly. Companies cannot avoid liability by staying silent about environmental performance if that silence creates an impression that doesn’t match the underlying reality. In contexts where consumers or business partners make decisions based on an assumed environmental standard — which is increasingly the default in B2B procurement — silence can function as a misleading omission rather than a safe neutral position.
In the U.S., the enforcement picture is more fragmented but no less active. State attorneys general on both ends of the political spectrum have increased activity on environmental claims over the past eighteen months. Some states are challenging companies for making environmental commitments they can’t substantiate. Others are specifically targeting companies that appear to be using environmental silence to obscure practices that would be controversial if disclosed.
As of early 2026, the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Green Guides are still under revision, with the updated guidelines expected to significantly tighten standards for environmental claims by strengthening requirements for substantiation and addressing potential omissions, largely in response to “greenwashing” concerns. The regulatory terrain is active regardless of which direction enforcement is coming from.
The practical implication: in 2023, a company that chose not to publish environmental targets had a reasonable argument that it was simply being cautious. In 2026, the same posture in a context where stakeholders are making decisions based on assumed environmental performance looks different to a regulator reviewing it.
The Commercial Cost Has Become Concrete
The regulatory exposure is real, but the commercial cost of greenhushing may be moving faster. And it’s coming from two directions simultaneously — investors and procurement.
Large institutional investors managing portfolios against CSRD, SFDR, or other disclosure frameworks need environmental data from the companies they hold. That need has shifted from preference to operational requirement. A company without environmental disclosure doesn’t just present an ethical gap in a portfolio — it creates a reporting friction problem for the investor’s own compliance obligations. That friction is increasingly being resolved by investment reallocation rather than continued engagement.
The procurement dynamic is closely related. Large buyers with their own Scope 3 compliance obligations are now requiring supplier environmental data as part of standard vendor management. A supplier that has no environmental disclosure process and no data to share isn’t presenting a philosophical disagreement — it’s presenting a compliance risk to the buyer. In competitive procurement contexts, that risk is a disqualifying factor, not a point of negotiation.
The pattern being reported across procurement teams in Europe and increasingly in North America: environmental silence from a supplier now triggers the same internal conversation as a poor safety record or a financial credit concern. It’s a due diligence flag. The shift from environmental performance being a “nice to have” in supplier evaluation to being a compliance input has happened quietly but concretely over the past eighteen months.
Why the Middle Ground Is Now the Only Ground
The instinct that drove greenhushing was defensible: overclaiming creates legal exposure, and if the alternative is making claims that can’t be fully substantiated, saying nothing feels safer. The problem is that the regulatory and commercial environment has closed the gap between those two positions.
The space that companies are being pushed toward — accurate, measured, evidence-based transparency about environmental performance — isn’t a compromise between greenwashing and greenhushing. It’s structurally different from both. It requires building a communications posture that accurately reflects actual performance and commitments, with appropriate caveats for areas of uncertainty, clear distinctions between what has been verified and what remains estimated, and honest framing of the constraints that limit progress.
That posture is harder to construct than either overclaiming or silence, because it requires cross-functional alignment. The sustainability team needs to own the underlying data. Legal needs to review the framing. Communications needs to translate both into language that’s accurate without being defensive. And the C-suite needs to have made a deliberate decision about what the company will and won’t say — and why.
What makes this worth the organizational investment is that companies that have built it consistently outperform in investor and stakeholder conversations. Not because their environmental performance is necessarily stronger, but because they’re providing information their counterparts need, in a form that’s transparent about limitations. That’s a harder position to attack than one that either overpromises or says nothing.
The Decision That Belongs at the Executive Level
The reason this belongs in the C-suite conversation rather than the sustainability team’s quarterly review is that closing the greenhushing exposure requires authority that no single function holds independently. Communications teams can’t revise public-facing materials without input from legal and sustainability. Legal can assess the exposure but can’t build the data architecture to resolve it. Sustainability can identify the gaps but can’t unilaterally change what investor relations says on an earnings call.
The practical starting point is an audit of what the company’s silence is currently communicating — in its public materials, its investor disclosures, and its procurement relationships. Not a theoretical exercise, but a concrete review of where the absence of environmental information is creating impressions that don’t match operational reality.
Companies that run that review proactively tend to find that the gap is manageable. Most environmental programs, even ones that have been deliberately kept quiet, have defensible stories to tell — with appropriate framing. The challenge isn’t usually that there’s nothing to say. It’s that no one has been given the mandate to say it accurately.
The regulatory landscape of 2026 has effectively removed the neutral option that strategic silence was trying to occupy. Accurate, measured, evidence-based transparency is not the cautious choice between two risks. It’s the only position that manages both.
