The climate movement is losing on messaging. Here’s what to do about it.

Last week I spoke at an event called Beyond the Choir: Climate Messaging in a Polarised World at The Conduit in London. It was a 90-minute workshop and panel on climate messaging in a polarised world, hosted by Clover Hogan. I got to facilitate the workshop portion alongside Dr Stephen Backhouse, who is a theologian, researcher, consultant and someone who grew up inside a Christian nationalist community before spending his career studying the harm those worldviews cause.

I want to share some of what came out of it, because I think it’s directly relevant to anyone in a sustainability role trying to make progress right now.

Why it feels harder

I started the session by sharing something I’ve been observing across the teams we work with. Two or three years ago, the energy in sustainability was different. Teams were building innovation programs, setting moonshot goals, designing new ways of doing business. There was momentum.

What I’m seeing now is teams spending a significant chunk of their time fighting for resource, having to re-justify work that was already signed off, and proving the business case for things that used to be considered table stakes. Progress feels heavier and more of a slog.

The impact that politics have had on sustainability teams is real. There are well-resourced, politically powerful people actively working to roll back sustainability agendas in government, in business, in media. The headwinds are structural, not just cultural. Which means we need to be more strategic about how we work within them. We can’t afford to wait for them to leave office or rotate off the board. The work has to continue now.

The language problem most of us don’t see

Stephen then led the room through a simple but powerful exercise. He shared a list of words – empathy, justice, patriotism, security, tolerance, etc.

He asked people in small groups to discuss their top 3 words from the list, the ones that felt most aligned to their work and their values. And also to choose the bottom 3.

The groups shared their top words and Stephen talked about what those same words mean to far-right audiences. Not fringe audiences. Mainstream right-wing political movements across the UK, US, and Europe.

Take empathy. It sounds like the most agreeable word imaginable. But Stephen explained that in certain conservative and Christian nationalist communities, empathy has been deliberately coded as a weakness, a liberal concept, a manipulation tactic. The same with justice, which carries a specific political charge depending on who you’re talking to. And nature, which for some audiences doesn’t evoke the environment at all but rather a set of beliefs about what is “natural” versus “unnatural” in society.

We already know that net zero and DEI have become lightning rods. But the list of words doing the opposite of their intended job is much longer than most of us realise. Some of the language we use because it signals our values to each other is actively creating distance with the people we need on board.

The point isn’t to water down your message

This is where I’ve seen people get stuck when this topic comes up. The concern is that if you change your language, you’re compromising your position. You’re letting the other side win. You’re contributing to the erosion of the very concepts you’re trying to advance.

Stephen shared an example I found really helpful. He’s been working with local councils across England on environmental programs. A program framed around “nature” wouldn’t land in some Reform councils, for example. However, when they reframed the same work around “preserving English heritage” — same program, same outcomes, different name — people got on board, funding was approved, and it actually launched.

That’s not a capitulation. That’s communication. The question isn’t whether you hold your position, it’s whether you can translate it in a way that actually reaches people who don’t already agree with you. If you’re so attached to specific words that you can’t make progress, then the words have become more important to you than the work.

This applies inside organisations as much as it does in public discourse. The sustainability directors who are moving fastest right now are the ones who’ve learnt to speak the language of the room they’re in. Finance teams respond to risk and return. Operations teams respond to efficiency and control. Marketing teams respond to brand value, ad dollars, and consumer trust. The underlying case for sustainability doesn’t change, but how you frame it needs to.

What we learned from the panel

The second half of the event was a panel, facilitated by Clover, with Arji Manuelpillai, the poet and author, and Nameerah Hameed, founder of Climate Outreach. Both of them are doing work I genuinely don’t think I could manage – actually spending time with far-right audiences, not to debate them, but to understand them.

Arji told a story of the time he’s spent with people in the English Defense League, the EDL. He was trying to understand what was drawing people in. And what he found wasn’t ideology, at least not primarily. A lot of the men he spoke to had joined after their football club got relegated. They’d lost the regular ritual, the community, the sense of belonging that came with it. And then someone offered them a replacement.

The EDL had thought carefully about how to make participation easy and appealing. They arranged childcare. They put beers on the coach to marches. They made people feel welcome and included. They weren’t winning on argument. They were winning on community and belonging.

To me, this reframes the question. It’s not just about what we’re saying. It’s about whether the spaces and communities we’re building are actually welcoming to people who don’t already look and think like us.

On power, and what it actually means

What stayed with me from Nameerah’s contribution came in response to an audience question about power. Someone in the room asked about how the right tend to accumulate and use power. They are motivated by it. The left often seems ambivalent about it.

Nameerah shared what she’s seen actually work. Often in this movement, we’re obsessed with getting the statistics right. If only people knew the data of how bad it really is, they would care. The right know that this isn’t true. People connect with stories. Let’s not worry about getting the numbers exactly right and focus instead on connection. She also pushed back on the assumption that the climate message needs to travel through the climate community at all. It doesn’t, and expecting it to is part of the problem. The message spreads in ordinary conversation, with a neighbour, at a school gate, during football training. The most powerful messengers aren’t the experts or the advocates. They’re the trusted people already looked to by an audience, who already have a relationship with them. Getting them to share the story is the way.

Stephen gave that idea some structure. He drew a distinction between two kinds of power. The first is what the Greeks called archon, the root of archangel, archenemy, archnemesis. It’s hierarchical power. Power that works by hoarding, by dominance, by taking agency away from others. It’s the model most of us default to when we think about winning.

The second is kenosis, a completely different logic. Power that works by withdrawing, by making space, by giving agency away. Counterintuitively, this kind of power grows the more you distribute it. You don’t lose influence by passing the mic. You multiply it.

What this looks like inside your organisation

We’re seeing exactly this play out inside organisations. The sustainability teams making the most progress right now aren’t the ones holding all the cards. They’re the ones who’ve figured out how to enable other teams to lead on ESG topics, making sustainability someone else’s win, not just their own agenda.

In practice though, many sustainability teams still approach internal influence the way the archon model would suggest: setting the direction, owning the outcomes, pushing others to comply. It’s understandable. The urgency is real. But it tends to create resistance rather than momentum.

The shift happens when sustainability teams start listening first. Understanding what finance, operations, procurement, or marketing are actually trying to achieve, and then showing up as a partner who helps them get there, with sustainability baked in. That’s kenosis in practice. You give away some of the ownership, and the work spreads further than it ever would have if you’d kept hold of it.

Three things worth taking back to your work

If I had to distill what was most useful from the session for people doing sustainability work inside organisations, it would be this.

First, listening to people who disagree with you is not just a nice thing to do. It’s one of the most strategically useful things you can do. Whether that’s a board member who thinks the sustainability agenda has gone too far, a colleague in procurement who resists the new supplier standards, or a consumer segment that just doesn’t respond to your messaging, the more you understand their motivations, their fears, and their language, the more effective you’ll be.

Second, audit your language. Not to dilute your message, but to ask honestly whether the words you’re using are landing the way you intend. There’s a version of this that’s superficial and a version that’s rigorous. The rigorous version means sitting with people who don’t share your frame and asking what they actually hear when you talk.

Third, the difficulty is real and it’s political. The best sustainability teams I know are the ones who’ve stopped waiting for conditions to improve and started adapting to conditions as they are. That means being more strategic, more deliberate, and sometimes more patient than any of us want to be right now.

The session didn’t make me optimistic in a simple way. But it did remind me that the people doing this work are genuinely thinking hard about how to do it better. That feels like the right place to start.

The recording of the full event can be found here.