Surviving sustainability reporting season

02/04/25 • 28 min

The Sustainability Communicator with Mike Hower

As corporate sustainability teams shift to focus on regulatory and compliance, more sustainability professionals are spending a lot of time creating sustainability reports. These massive PDFs can sometimes be up to 100 pages or more and take many months to develop. Love them or hate them, sustainability reports are here to stay. And the process can take its toll on the people who create them – both for in house folk and consultants.

In this Brain Exchange episode, Mike sits down to talk with Dunia Namugayi, a sustainability reporting expert who has gone through many reporting cycles and can speak to how she maintains personal sustainability through the ups and downs of creating effective reports.

Follow Dunia Namugayi on LinkedIn
Read Mike's Trellis piece about finding personal sustainability in corporate sustainability.
Follow Mike on LinkedIn
Subscribe to The Sustainability Communicator LinkedIn newsletter
Sign up for Hower Impact's ENGAGE newsletter
Visit the Hower Impact website.
Contact Mike.

Follow Dunia Namugayi on LinkedIn
Read Mike's Trellis piece about finding personal sustainability in corporate sustainability.
Follow Mike on LinkedIn
Subscribe to The Sustainability Communicator LinkedIn newsletter
Sign up for Hower Impact's ENGAGE newsletter
Visit the Hower Impact website.
Contact Mike.

Previous Episode

Reclaiming the lost corporate sustainability narrative

In this timely Thinking Out Loud episode, host Mike Hower examines the evolving landscape of corporate sustainability as we enter 2025, offering a candid assessment of the shift from the "ESG Golden Age" to today's more complex reality. Drawing from his extensive experience in sustainability communications, Mike presents six key strategies for companies to reclaim their sustainability narrative: acknowledging trade-offs, focusing on material impact, bridging economic and environmental concerns, emphasizing practical solutions, breaking out of echo chambers, and embracing humility about private sector limitations. Despite highlighting significant challenges, including missed emissions targets and record-breaking temperatures, Mike maintains optimism, pointing to strong public support for corporate climate action and advocating for a more mature, honest approach to sustainability communication that balances acknowledging difficulties with maintaining commitment to necessary change.

Read 6 strategies for finding corporate sustainability’s lost narrative in 2025
Check out the recent Pew poll on climate change sentiments in the U.S.
Follow Mike on LinkedIn
Subscribe to The Sustainability Communicator LinkedIn newsletter
Sign up for Hower Impact's ENGAGE newsletter
Visit the Hower Impact website.
Contact Mike.

Next Episode

Sustainability storytellers weigh in from GreenBiz 25

At a time when corporate sustainability faces unprecedented headwinds, last week's GreenBiz25 conference proved that sustainability leaders aren't backing down – they're doubling down on their commitments and getting more strategic about their communication. In this special episode of The Sustainability Communicator, Mike Hower sat down with six sustainability leaders from diverse industries to understand how they're navigating these challenging times.

From Aileen Lerch at Allbirds discussing the power of "applied hope," to Elizabeth Eldridge at Kaiser Permanente sharing how they're moving beyond buzzwords to build trust, to Marcella Thompson at CBRE explaining how they're making sustainability visible in the built environment, each conversation revealed how companies are evolving their sustainability storytelling for 2025 and beyond. These candid discussions, recorded live at GreenBiz25 in Phoenix, offer a unique window into how leading companies are balancing compliance, credibility, and compelling narratives in their sustainability communications.