Green hushing

Green hushing refers to the deliberate withholding or concealment of information about a company's actually existing sustainability goals, measures, or achievements. The term is thus the counterpart to greenwashing: while greenwashing involves exaggerating or overstating unsubstantiated environmental claims, green hushing involves companies refraining from communicating about real, often well-founded climate action they are already undertaking.

The main driver of green hushing is concern about being publicly criticized for insufficient or unclear sustainability claims. With growing regulatory and public scrutiny of greenwashing accusations, and increasing legal uncertainty about which claims are robust enough, some companies choose not to talk about their climate goals at all rather than risk being accused of misleading communication.

In practice, green hushing shows up when companies pursue science-based targets under the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) but do not communicate them publicly, when calculated carbon footprints exist internally but are not published, or when promotional environmental claims about products are avoided entirely, even where the products demonstrably have improved environmental properties.

Green hushing therefore sits in tension between corporate caution and the goal of transparency toward investors, customers, and the public. It can also conflict with binding disclosure obligations such as those under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which require active reporting on sustainability performance, and overall makes it harder to compare and assess companies based on their actual climate performance.