Over the past 20 years, I’ve worked with companies at every stage of maturity on sustainability reporting, from early, largely narrative reports through to today’s highly structured disclosures.

Frameworks have evolved, but the underlying communications challenge has not. The same questions surface time and again: What do I include? Why am I writing this content? Who is it for? Which gaps should I prioritise now, and which can be addressed over time? When these questions are not answered clearly, sustainability communications quickly become a compliance exercise rather than a way of building trust.

Different starting points, similar challenges

In the past year alone, I’ve worked with companies producing their first sustainability report, as well as organisations with established reporting processes seeking targeted support on specific areas such as climate risk disclosures. Despite very different levels of maturity, the communications challenges are often similar.

First-time reporters tend to focus on putting basic foundations in place: strategies, governance arrangements and data collection systems. The act of reporting itself often exposes gaps and forces decisions about what can credibly be said. More experienced reporters, by contrast, often struggle with volume, large amounts of data, but limited clarity about what the information is meant to convey.

What trust looks like in practice

While not all organisations fall within the scope of CSRD, expectations around sustainability reporting are rising across the board. For those that do fall within scope, sustainability information now sits firmly within regulated reporting, requiring much closer alignment between narrative, data and governance. This alignment is where I most often see companies struggle. Gaps emerge between storytelling and evidence. Targets and ambitions are highlighted without sufficient explanation of how they will be delivered, and positive trends are emphasised while challenges, trade-offs and limitations receive less attention.

The shipping sector illustrates this tension clearly. Many companies have committed publicly to net zero or near-zero emissions targets, often aligned with investor or customer expectations. At the same time, progress at an international level on the International Maritime Organization’s decarbonisation framework, which is critical to enabling long-term emissions reductions across the sector, has remained uncertain and contested through 2025. This creates a disconnect between ambition and delivery that cannot be resolved by company action alone. Under CSRD, organisations are expected to explain these dependencies, uncertainties and constraints, including where outcomes rely on regulatory, technological or infrastructure developments beyond their direct control. In practice, credibility is strengthened, not weakened, when companies are open about what they do not yet have under control.

Consistency builds credibility

Inconsistency across communications channels further undermines trust. Sustainability claims in marketing materials, investor presentations or corporate websites do not always align with regulated disclosures. As sustainability information becomes more tightly regulated, these inconsistencies become more visible, more risky and potentially more damaging.

There are, however, opportunities to communicate more clearly and more openly than the minimum required by CSRD. Narrative sections that sit alongside regulated sustainability statements can help explain context, decisions and performance in a way that is accessible to a broader audience, without cutting across formal disclosure requirements.

CSRD does not remove the need for clear communication; it makes it more important. Organisations that use sustainability reporting as a tool to explain their direction, decisions and dilemmas will be far better placed to build credibility with investors, regulators and other stakeholders over the long term.

So, what does this mean in practice? In a more regulated, more scrutinised reporting environment, credibility no longer comes from polished narratives or ambitious targets alone. It comes from coherence between what companies say, what they disclose, and how they make decisions, even when the story is uncomfortable. Those that get this right will not just meet reporting expectations; they will earn trust by demonstrating that sustainability is being managed with rigour, realism and accountability.