As Climate Week NYC wrapped, IKEA's Chief Sustainability Officer, Lena Julle, published a short, clear-eyed op-ed on where sustainability communication is headed. Her argument mirrors the one we've been making: the era defined by commitments is giving way to an era defined by evidence.
From commitments to evidence
For years, sustainability was shaped around targets — the changes companies said they wanted to create. That focus mattered; it moved sustainability from the sidelines to the centre of strategy. But evolving rules, including the EU's CSRD and its Empowering Consumers Directive, now expect companies to show measurable progress and substantiate what they claim. The bar has shifted from stating intent to proving it.
“Companies may “say less until they can demonstrate more.” — Lena Julle, Chief Sustainability Officer, Inter IKEA Group”
That line captures the whole shift in a sentence. Saying less until you can demonstrate more is not a retreat from ambition — it is a move toward disciplined, defensible communication. Less volume, more substantiation. As IKEA puts it, frameworks, methodologies and even targets may evolve, but the underlying work — renewable energy, materials, supply chains, and integrating sustainability into everyday decisions — continues.
Where we'd go a step further
IKEA is understandably careful about tying sustainability directly to financial performance, framing it instead around competitiveness, resilience and investment confidence. We think the stronger position for most companies is to go further: connect strategy, financial performance, sustainability, risk and governance into one corporate story. Reporting is no longer the objective — it is the evidence layer for what the business is actually doing.
It reinforces the position now at the core of our work: frameworks are the structure, not the story; credibility beats volume; and sustainability has to live inside the business. As CSRD, SEC expectations, California's climate laws and voluntary practice keep shifting, the durable proposition isn't “more reporting” — it is helping companies explain how sustainability fits into the business, credibly, clearly, and with evidence.
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