Featured In: Marketing Africa Magazine, Date: August 2026 edition
Sometimes the most significant changes in business do not announce themselves with dramatic headlines. They emerge gradually, almost quietly, until one day the conversation sounds completely different from the one everyone was having only a few years before.
That is the crossroads that sustainability finds itself today.
Not long ago, discussions about sustainability were largely defined by ambition. Organisations announced net-zero commitments, published glossy sustainability reports, invested in community programmes and proudly shared stories about renewable energy projects, biodiversity initiatives and responsible sourcing. Businesses wanted to demonstrate that they were part of the solution, and sustainability became one of the defining narratives of modern corporate leadership.
Today, the conversation has changed.
Spend time in sustainability conferences or regulatory forums and a different set of questions begins to emerge. Executives are no longer looking at what sustainability initiatives they should launch, rather, they are asking which reporting framework applies to their organisation, what information regulators will require, how climate-related risks should be governed, whether sustainability data can withstand external assurance and how quickly reporting obligations are likely to become mandatory.
The language is becoming noticeably more technical. Beneath that technical language however, lies something much bigger than compliance.
Businesses are entering a period where sustainability is no longer judged primarily by the quality of its intentions but by the quality of its evidence.
This distinction matters because it changes the role sustainability plays inside an organisation. What was once viewed largely as a corporate responsibility initiative or a communications exercise is steadily becoming part of mainstream business management. Decisions that were previously discussed within sustainability teams are now finding their way onto board agendas, into investor presentations and increasingly into discussions about risk, governance and long-term competitiveness.
This transition is unfolding across much of the world.
Reason? The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) has established a global baseline for sustainability disclosures. Regions like Europe have introduced the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards and other jurisdictions are building their own reporting roadmaps while aligning with internationally recognised frameworks. Every nation is on a tight timeline.
For many organisations, the question is no longer whether sustainability reporting is coming, it is how prepared they are when it arrives.
Beneath this movement however, lies a question that deserves far more attention than it currently receives. If sustainability reporting is becoming the language through which businesses are increasingly evaluated, who decides what that language measures?
Whose priorities shape it?
What does it reward?
What does it overlook?
This article is not an argument against global sustainability standards. No. Quite the opposite.
In many respects, the emergence of common reporting frameworks is one of the most important developments sustainability has seen. Consistent standards reduce confusion, improve transparency and make it harder for organisations to make ambitious environmental claims without demonstrating measurable progress. Further, businesses operating across multiple jurisdictions benefit from speaking a common language.
But common languages are rarely complete.
They evolve, absorb new perspectives and become richer as different societies begin using them in different ways. Think for example of regions whose development journeys differ significantly from those in which many of today’s sustainability frameworks first emerged. The application of the standards ought to differ accordingly.
The next chapter of sustainability reporting may therefore depend not only on how well organisations comply with emerging standards, but also on how thoughtfully those standards are interpreted, implemented and refined across very different economic contexts.
That conversation has already begun and it is also changing the role of business functions that many organisations may not yet expect.
Marketing is one of them.
Before exploring why, however, it is worth stepping back to understand how sustainability arrived at this moment in the first place.
When Sustainability Needed Rules
For much of the last two decades, sustainability occupied an unusual position inside business.
While finance had accounting standards, health and safety had regulations, manufacturing had internationally recognised quality systems, and corporate governance operated within well-established legal frameworks, sustainability evolved differently.
It grew largely through voluntary action.
Businesses experimented. Industry associations developed guidance. Investors created their own frameworks. Non-governmental organisations introduced reporting methodologies. Governments encouraged disclosure but, in many cases, stopped short of making it mandatory.
For a time, that flexibility served an important purpose.
It allowed organisations to move ahead of regulation rather than waiting for it. Companies invested in renewable energy, redesigned products, improved resource efficiency, strengthened employee wellbeing and expanded community programmes because they recognised that long-term business success depended on more than quarterly financial results.
Those early years were characterised by experimentation.
Different industries explored different priorities, different businesses measured success differently and it is that diversity that helped sustainability mature.
As the topic gained momentum, it became more valuable.
Customers began paying closer attention to environmental and social performance. Investors started incorporating climate-related risks into capital allocation decisions. Financial institutions introduced sustainability criteria into lending. Governments began using sustainability requirements within procurement. Prospective employees increasingly wanted to work for organisations whose values aligned with their own.
Over time, sustainability stopped being simply the right thing to do and became a competitive advantage; And when commercial value is attached to the business, another force almost always appears alongside it. The incentive to look better than reality, which in turn, introduces a different type of difficulty.
That is, there were very few common rules governing how an organisation’s efforts should be measured, compared or communicated.
One company might highlight carbon reductions.
Another might focus on tree planting.
Another might emphasise diversity.
Another might showcase volunteer programmes.
Each could produce an impressive sustainability report while measuring entirely different things.
Comparing those reports often resembled comparing countries using different maps. The destinations appeared similar but the routes, measurements and definitions were not.
Over time, the consequences became increasingly apparent.
Imagine two organisations making similar environmental claims. One has spent years collecting operational data, engaging independent assurance providers, tracing emissions throughout its supply chain and documenting the methodology behind every disclosure.
The other has redesigned its packaging, introduced a recycling campaign and built a marketing programme around responsible and sustainable operations.
To many customers, these two organisations might appear equally committed.
To investors, they may initially appear comparable.
Behind the claims, however, sit entirely different levels of evidence.
Without common standards, distinguishing genuine performance from persuasive communication becomes remarkably difficult. This is where the conversation around greenwashing gathered momentum.
Greenwashing is often described as making misleading environmental claims, but this explanation captures only part of the problem. Sometimes organisations deliberately exaggerate or more often, they simply work within inconsistent systems.
A business may genuinely believe it has become more sustainable because it has improved one aspect of its operations while overlooking impacts elsewhere. Another may announce ambitious long-term targets without establishing robust systems for measuring progress. Others may communicate achievements enthusiastically without explaining the assumptions, boundaries or methodologies behind the numbers.
Intentions matter, but evidence matters more.
This distinction sits at the heart of why sustainability reporting has evolved so rapidly. The purpose of reporting standards is to make sustainability less bureaucratic and more trustworthy.
Every mature business discipline eventually reaches this point.
Financial reporting exists because investors need confidence that two companies calculate revenue using comparable principles.
Food labelling exists because consumers expect nutritional information to mean the same thing regardless of which brand they buy.
Engineering standards exist because society expects bridges to remain safe regardless of where they are built.
Standards emerge wherever trust becomes too important to leave to individual interpretation.
Sustainability has now reached that stage.
As environmental and social performance begin influencing investment decisions, procurement processes, lending, insurance, regulation and corporate valuation, trust can no longer depend solely on good intentions or compelling narratives.
It requires common definition, common methodologies and common expectations.
This is the environment from which today’s sustainability reporting standards have emerged.
Whether through the ISSB, the European Sustainability Reporting Standards, the Global Reporting Initiative or other recognised frameworks, the objective is broadly the same: to create information that is sufficiently reliable, consistent and comparable to support better business decisions.
That objective deserves broad support.
Yet the emergence of common standards raises another question….one that becomes impossible to ignore once those standards begin moving beyond theory and into practice. If businesses operating in very different economic realities are expected to speak the same reporting language, can that language always capture what matters most in every context?
That question becomes particularly relevant for economies that are pursuing industrial growth, expanding energy access and strengthening climate resilience all at the same time.
And it is there that the next phase of the sustainability conversation begins.
A Common Language, Different Realities
The search for common standards irrespective of whichever industry has always been driven by a simple objective: comparability.
Investors comparing two companies should not have to decipher two entirely different reporting systems before understanding their sustainability performance. Regulators should be able to evaluate disclosures using consistent criteria. Customers, lenders and insurers all benefit when businesses measure similar issues in similar ways.
In principle, it is difficult to argue against that ambition.
Yet every global framework eventually encounters the same challenge. How does one standard remain globally consistent while recognising that countries do not all begin from the same starting point?
This is not unique to sustainability.
International accounting standards are applied across economies with very different ownership structures, tax systems and capital markets. Building codes are interpreted differently depending on climate, geography and available materials. Medical guidelines are adapted to reflect local disease burdens and healthcare systems. The underlying principles remain consistent, but successful implementation must almost always reflects local realities.
Sustainability reporting is beginning to arrive at the same point.
Sustainability disclosures attempt to explain how a business interacts with the economy, society and the environment around it. Those relationships are shaped by history, politics, geography and development priorities. They cannot always be understood through a single lens.
That does not diminish the value of common standards. It simply reminds us that sustainability is rarely experienced in identical ways.
For many developed economies, industrialisation largely preceded today’s climate agenda. Manufacturing capacity, national infrastructure, electricity networks and urban development were established long before decarbonisation became a central policy objective.
Many African economies are experiencing a different reality.
Industrialisation, energy access, urbanisation, climate resilience and economic transformation are unfolding simultaneously. This therefore changes the nature of the questions sustainability reporting is expected to answer.
Consider electricity.
For many businesses, energy is discussed almost exclusively in terms of carbon intensity, renewable generation or emissions reduction. Those are entirely legitimate concerns, yet in many parts of Africa, electricity carries another dimension altogether.
Reliable power determines whether manufacturers can operate competitively. It influences whether hospitals can refrigerate medicines, whether schools can support digital learning, whether agricultural produce can be processed locally and whether small businesses can extend trading hours beyond daylight.
An electricity project may therefore represent both an environmental discussion and a development discussion.
Neither perspective is complete without the other.
The same complexity appears across multiple sectors.
Mining creates environmental impacts that require careful management, while simultaneously supplying the critical minerals needed for batteries, electric vehicles and renewable technologies.
Manufacturing consumes energy and natural resources, yet also creates employment, develops technical capability and reduces dependence on imported goods.
Transport infrastructure affects ecosystems while connecting businesses to markets and communities to economic opportunity.
None of these examples suggest that environmental considerations should become secondary, rather, they demonstrate that sustainability is often about managing competing priorities rather than optimising a single objective.
Which then leads us to one of the most useful concepts within sustainability reporting; materiality.
At its simplest, materiality asks one deceptively straightforward question: What matters enough to measure?
The difficulty is that different stakeholders answer that question differently.
An investor may focus on climate-related financial risks. A government may place greater emphasis on industrial competitiveness and energy security. Communities may care most about employment, livelihoods or access to basic services and environmental organisations may prioritise biodiversity and emissions.
Each perspective contributes something valuable.
None, on its own, captures the whole picture.
This becomes particularly evident when examining projects that sit at the intersection of economic development and environmental responsibility.
The Greater Tortue Ahmeyim natural gas project shared between Senegal and Mauritania offers one example. Viewed from one perspective, it introduces new fossil fuel production into a world attempting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Viewed from another, it represents export earnings, industrial development, employment and improved energy security for two countries seeking to accelerate economic transformation.
Neither interpretation is inaccurate, and neither is sufficient on its own.
Good sustainability reporting should not force businesses, investors or policymakers to choose between these perspectives. It should provide enough transparency for both to be understood together.
That is why I believe Africa’s most important contribution to sustainability reporting is unlikely to be the creation of an entirely separate reporting framework. Rather, it lies in demonstrating how globally consistent standards can be implemented in ways that remain faithful to local realities without sacrificing comparability.
This is already beginning to happen.
Across the continent, the conversation has matured considerably over the past few years. The debate is no longer centred on whether international sustainability standards should be adopted. It has moved to a more practical and consequential question: how should those standards be implemented in ways that remain globally credible while reflecting local economic realities?
This distinction may sound administrative, but it is anything but.
Nigeria illustrates this shift clearly. Rather than merely adopting the International Sustainability Standards Board framework, the country has focused on building the institutional architecture needed to support it. National implementation guidance, readiness assessments and phased adoption plans all designed to recognise that successful reporting depends as much on organisational capability as it does on technical standards.
South Africa has followed its own path too, strengthening governance expectations while aligning disclosure guidance with international frameworks. Rather than replacing global standards, regulators have concentrated on preparing organisations for a reporting environment that demands greater transparency, stronger oversight and more disciplined disclosure.
In a different yet similar illustration of the same principle is Ghana’s cocoa sector. Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, which together produce a significant share of the world’s cocoa, have sought to strengthen sustainability expectations in ways that work alongside global market requirements, including the European Union’s deforestation rules, rather than against them. Ghana’s wider push to increase local cocoa processing adds another layer to the discussion proving why sustainability cannot be measured through traceability or emissions alone. Standard development in this case looks beyond documenting compliance to asking questions on whether more value is retained locally and whether farmers and processors share more fairly in the wealth created by the crop.
That is development materiality in action.
Although African countries are taking different routes, they appear to be moving from a shared premise: implementation matters just as much as standard-setting.
The future of sustainability reporting will be shaped by the systems they build to make those rules meaningful. And perhaps this is where Africa’s greatest opportunity lies.
The International Sustainability Standards Board has consistently described its framework as a global baseline.
That choice of language is important.
A baseline is not intended to answer every question.
It establishes consistency while allowing jurisdictions to develop guidance, governance structures and implementation pathways that reflect their own institutional maturity and economic priorities.
Viewed this way, implementation then becomes part of the evolution of the standards themselves.
The strongest global frameworks have never remained static. They improve through experience. They evolve as businesses apply them, regulators refine them and professional bodies respond to practical challenges that only become visible once implementation begins.
As businesses look to the next chapter of sustainability reporting, they must understand that the most carefully designed reporting framework cannot transform an organisation on its own.
A standard can define what should be disclosed but it cannot build the systems required to produce that information, it cannot establish governance, it cannot improve data quality and neither can it prepare leadership teams for entirely new responsibilities.
Those changes happen somewhere else.
They happen inside the business itself, and that may prove to be the most significant transformation of all.
From Reporting to Running the Business
The biggest misconception surrounding sustainability reporting is that it is primarily about producing another corporate report.
That assumption is understandable. Reports are, after all, the most visible outcome of the entire process. They are the documents that investors download, regulators review and customers sometimes reference. Yet while it is the report that tells a story, the organisation behind it determines whether that story is true.
Long before a sustainability report reaches the public domain, departments that have rarely worked together begin asking each other entirely new questions.
The finance team wants emissions data from operations.
Procurement needs information from suppliers that has never previously been requested.
Legal begins reviewing environmental claims before they leave the organisation.
Technology teams discover that systems originally designed to track financial transactions now need to capture information on emissions, waste, water consumption and supply chains.
Risk managers start asking how climate events could influence business continuity, insurance costs or future investment decisions.
Meanwhile, the board finds itself discussing sustainability not as a communications initiative but as part of enterprise governance.
None of these conversations appear in the final report, yet they are the most important consequence of reporting.
The report simply reveals the organisation that already exists beneath it. That is why businesses often underestimate the scale of change sustainability reporting requires.
The challenge is never writing the report itself, it is understanding whether the organisation is capable of producing one that is complete, reliable and credible.
The information needed to explain sustainability performance comprehensively rarely sits in a single platform nor is it collected for a single purpose.
Energy consumption may sit within facilities management, fleet data belongs somewhere else, business travel is managed by finance, supplier information sits with procurement, human rights data may be held within people and culture, waste management is owned by operations and environmental compliance is monitored elsewhere.
Each department has been collecting information for legitimate operational reasons. Sustainability reporting asks the organisation to connect those individual pieces into one coherent picture.
That sounds deceptively simple. Right.
Well, in practice, it often requires businesses to understand themselves in ways they never have before and this is perhaps one of the least appreciated benefits of sustainability reporting.
Before an organisation can communicate its sustainability performance with confidence, it must first understand how sustainability flows through the business itself.
That process creates visibility.
Visibility creates accountability.
Accountability influences decision-making.
The report is therefore not the beginning of organisational change, rather, it is usually evidence that the change has already begun.
Here, we see an interesting parallel with financial reporting. When investors read an annual financial statement, they rarely think about the accounting policies, internal controls, audit processes and governance systems operating quietly throughout the year.
Those systems are largely invisible, yet without them, the financial report could not exist.
The same principle is beginning to apply to sustainability.
Reliable sustainability information depends on management systems that operate every day, and not just during reporting season. This is one reason the conversation has moved beyond sustainability departments. Attend almost any sustainability conference today and the audience has different industry practitioners from across the business; from chief executives, finance leaders, board directors, risk professionals, procurement specialists, legal advisers and even investors.
That change is telling.
It reflects a growing recognition that sustainability is no longer a specialist discipline sitting alongside the business. It is becoming part of how the business is managed.
This shift is also changing the questions leadership teams are asking. The discussion is no longer limited to reducing emissions or publishing another sustainability report.
Boards want to understand whether climate risks could affect long-term profitability.
Investors want greater confidence that sustainability information is reliable enough to inform capital allocation decisions.
Banks are examining environmental and social risks as part of lending decisions.
Customers are asking more searching questions about supply chains and sourcing practices.
Procurement teams are introducing sustainability requirements into supplier evaluations.
Insurers are reassessing climate-related exposure.
Taken individually, these developments may appear incremental. Taken together, they signal that sustainability is moving steadily into the mainstream of business management. That is why relegating reporting as a compliance exercise misses the larger point.
The organisations that derive the greatest value from reporting will be the organisations that use the information generated through reporting to improve investment decisions, strengthen governance, identify emerging risks, build more resilient supply chains and allocate resources more effectively.
In other words, the greatest value of sustainability reporting will not be the report itself, instead, it will be the better business that emerges from the discipline of producing it.
That evolution then raises another question. If organisations are moving from communicating sustainability ambitions to communicating sustainability evidence, how should that evidence be translated into language that customers, investors, employees and society can understand?
For decades, that responsibility has belonged to marketing.
Its role is about to become considerably more important.
The New Language of Trust
Throughout much of the sustainability movement, marketing has often been viewed as the function responsible for communicating an organisation’s environmental and social commitments. Once the sustainability report was published, the natural assumption was that marketing would extract the highlights, build campaigns around the achievements and help the organisation tell its story.
That model is about to get a major upgrade.
As sustainability becomes more deeply embedded within the business, the conversation increasingly shifts to what it can demonstrate, how it measured its performance and whether its claims can withstand independent scrutiny. This will change the nature of sustainability communication completely.
For many years, marketers quite naturally began with the story. What have we achieved? What do we want people to know? How do we inspire confidence in our brand?
Those questions remain relevant, but they are no longer the starting point.
Increasingly, the first question is much simpler. What can we prove?
The answer to that question determines everything that follows.
The most compelling sustainability campaign cannot compensate for weak governance, incomplete data or claims that cannot be substantiated. In much the same way that financial performance cannot be communicated before the numbers have been reconciled and approved, sustainability communication is becoming anchored in evidence generated throughout the organisation.
This does not diminish the role of marketing. It elevates it.
As sustainability reporting becomes more sophisticated, organisations are generating unprecedented volumes of technical information. Climate-related risks, greenhouse gas emissions, materiality assessments, supply chain disclosures, governance structures, assurance statements and transition plans are becoming part of the corporate narrative. Much of this information is essential for investors, regulators and sustainability professionals, yet it is often inaccessible to customers, employees and the wider public.
Someone still has to bridge that gap.
Marketing is uniquely positioned to do so.
Its role is to interpret it and communicate sustainability clearly.
The distinction is significant.
Interpretation requires understanding before communication. It requires marketers to participate earlier in the conversation, long before the annual report is published or the campaign is developed. Materiality assessments, stakeholder engagement, governance discussions and disclosure planning are no longer activities taking place on the periphery of marketing. They increasingly shape the stories that organisations are able to tell with confidence.
This also changes how sustainability should be viewed within marketing itself.
For many organisations, sustainability has been treated as another campaign theme, sitting alongside product launches, employer branding and corporate reputation. Increasingly, it is becoming something much more foundational; the evidence upon which reputation is built.
That distinction is likely to become even more important as scrutiny of environmental and social claims continues to grow. Around the world, regulators are strengthening expectations around green claims, consumer protection authorities are paying closer attention to misleading environmental marketing and investors are examining sustainability disclosures with a level of rigour that would once have been reserved almost exclusively for financial statements.
The audience has changed.
Customers still want to know what organisations stand for.
Investors want to understand how sustainability risks are being managed.
Employees want confidence that the values communicated externally are reflected internally.
Communities want transparency.
Regulators want consistency.
Each audience is asking different questions, yet all of them are searching for the same thing.
Evidence they can trust.
This is why the future of sustainability communication is unlikely to be defined by organisations making bigger promises, instead, it will be defined by organisations making clearer ones.
The brands that distinguish themselves will not necessarily be those producing the most ambitious sustainability campaigns or publishing the longest reports. They will be those that communicate with a level of clarity, transparency and consistency that allows different stakeholders to understand not only what the organisation has achieved, but also how those achievements were measured, what challenges remain and where further progress is still required.
In that sense, marketing is undergoing one of the most significant transitions in modern history.
For decades, the profession has helped organisations shape reputation by communicating vision, purpose and value. Those responsibilities still remain, but alongside them sits another.
Marketing is becoming the translator between technical credibility and public understanding.
Finance validates the numbers.
Operations generate much of the performance.
Sustainability teams analyse impacts and disclosures.
Legal provides oversight.
Marketing connects that evidence to the people who ultimately decide whether an organisation deserves their confidence.
And this is where marketing’s contribution to sustainability becomes most valuable. It ensures that the stories organisations tell are firmly grounded in evidence, communicated with honesty and understood by the audiences whose trust businesses depend upon.
Trust has always been one of marketing’s most valuable assets.
The difference is that, in the years ahead, trust will increasingly be earned through transparency rather than aspiration, through evidence rather than assertion, and through consistent demonstration rather than carefully crafted messaging.
This is not the end of storytelling. It is the beginning of a new language of trust.
Looking ahead
When sustainability first entered mainstream business conversations, many assumed the greatest challenge would be persuading organisations to care about environmental and social issues. In hindsight, that may have been the easier task. The more demanding challenge has been learning how to measure those commitments with the same discipline that businesses have long applied to financial performance.
That transition is now well underway.
Sustainability reporting is the beginning of a more disciplined way of thinking about business itself. It encourages organisations to look beyond individual initiatives and ask a more fundamental question: How do we create value in a way that can be measured, understood and trusted over the long term?
Perhaps this is why the changes unfolding today have attracted relatively little public attention. They are not taking place through headline announcements or high-profile campaigns. They are happening in risk reviews, procurement discussions, finance functions, sustainability teams and marketing departments. They are reshaping the systems that sit behind the organisations we see every day.
Years from now, businesses may look back on this period and conclude that the sustainability report was never the real story.
The real story was that, quietly and almost unnoticed, sustainability ceased to be something organisations simply talked about and became something they learned to manage.
And in doing so, it changed the way trust itself is built.
