 Bing Guan/File Photo/ReutersPR shops that specialize in climate have more work than ever — but it’s also getting a lot harder. At Climate Week NYC last month, the conference rooms, bars, and hotel lobbies of midtown Manhattan were filled with climate-focused corporate executives, political leaders, and the journalists chasing after them. But in between them all were countless third-party communications consultants — many more than I’ve seen in previous Climate Weeks — working overtime to get their clients into the right meetings and onto — or out of — the front pages of the global press. Companies are touting climate solutions, jostling for a seat at the table for important policy decisions, and trying to respond to or, better yet, avoid controversies. There are also more journalists on the climate beat. PR firms are an inevitable link between those trends. For those who focus on sustainability, these days they’re both busier than ever and having to manage a much more technically complicated — and potentially fraught — docket: Climate action, once an afterthought in corporate comms, is now an indispensable element of corporate public messaging. “Huge brands are rewiring their communications strategy to weave in a climate story that advances broader market leadership — and that’s when they could be talking about their product or simply keeping quiet,” said Matt Stewart, West Coast general manager for Method Communications. “Many corporations talked about climate somewhere before, but today it’s much more pervasive.” Journalists rely on comms firms perhaps more than we would like to admit, as the gatekeepers to newsmaking corporate executives. But in climate, as in other fields, there’s a natural conflict between journalists’ core interest — breaking accurate news — and the comms folks’, which is to serve clients. That conflict can easily lead down the slippery slope to greenwashing if journalists are inattentive. That dynamic is nothing new, and hasn’t changed; greenwashing still happens every day. But I find that compared to a few years ago, there are not only more comms consultants working in climate, but they’re getting more specialized and sophisticated on the issues, and more willing to push back against initiatives that aren’t scientifically up to snuff — in the interest of protecting their and their clients’ reputations, if nothing else. |
