The label is broken. The work is not.

Sustainability matters more than ever. The way we report it does not.

I want to say something that gets me into trouble at events.

The work the sustainability profession does has never mattered more. The label we put on it, and the way we measure it, are both badly broken.

In the US, ESG has become a political insult. In Europe, it is drowning in reporting frameworks nobody reads. In boardrooms across the world, it is the slide everyone scrolls past on the way to the financials. And in your own organisation, I would bet a decent lunch, the word “ESG” makes at least one senior person visibly tired.

That is a problem, but it is not the problem people think it is. The work itself, reducing harm, creating value for people and communities, building organisations that last, has never been more commercially important. What has stopped working is the language and the measurement.

What actually broke

The language has been politicised and reduced to a tickbox. The measurement has been narrowed to whatever fits a disclosure framework, which is rarely the thing that actually matters. Together, those two failures have made it harder, not easier, for impact teams to make the case for their work inside their own organisations.

The teams winning right now have quietly noticed this. They have stopped defending ESG as a category and stopped trying to fit their work into reporting templates designed for someone else’s purpose. They talk about sustainability. They talk about social value. They talk about what their work actually does: revenue protected, risk reduced, talent retained, customers won, communities strengthened, value created.

Same work. Different language. Different measurement. Wildly different reception.

This is not a rebrand. It is a recognition that the audience changed, and the way we report and measure has not kept up.

The takeaway

The sustainability agenda is bigger and more important than ever. The way we currently label and measure it is the problem.

Fight for the work, not the framework.