B2C: You can either raise the issues and educate people on climate-related topics or you can normalise sustainable behaviours.

• Educate people on climate-related issues. Consider communicating on the following topics:
  • Biodiversity
  • Greenhouse Gas emissions
  • Impacts of climate change
  • Energy
  • Deforestation
  • Circular Economy
  • Sustainable and ethical sourcing
  • Renewable energy

Use the list of reputable sources to identify facts and references on these topics.

Ensure the content is tailored to the audience. Use messages and visuals that appeal to the readers and catch their attention.

• Normalise sustainable behaviours:
  Consider how consumers can change their behaviour throughout the day. A few examples of topics where consumers can adopt sustainable behaviours are given below.
  
  
  • Food:
    Encourage healthy, in-season, locally and sustainably sourced ingredients and products and communicate about the benefits of consuming healthy and sustainable products.
    
    Communicate about the carbon footprint of various food diet (e.g. impacts of a omnivore diet vs. a vegan or vegetarian diet) and how consumers’ choices can help reduce GHG emissions.
    
    Normalise sustainable behaviours during cooking (e.g. how to save energy, reduce/reuse water, and cook the right amount), consumption and end of life (difference between use by date and best before date, encourage consumers to check the use by dates, avoid buying more that they need, normalise the use of freezers for leftovers and/or provide tips for reusing leftovers into other meals).
    
    
  • Mobility:
    Encourage readers to walk or cycle wherever possible or use public transport.
    
    Communicate about other benefits of walking and cycling (improves health through exercising, exposition to natural light, reduced pollution). Regarding commuting, favour public transport or carpooling if walking or cycling is not possible.
    
    With long-distance travel, favour trains over flying. Provide data on the carbon emissions saved by not flying and convert this emissions reduction into something that the reader can understand.
    
    
  • Clothing:
    Educate the readers about the environmental (and social) impact of clothing (e.g. amount of water required, chemicals used, GHG emitted), encourage the readers to re-consider whether a purchase is needed, to buy second-hand clothes, to repair what can be repaired, to donate when no longer needed and, at last resort, to recycle.
    
    Communicate about the importance of not putting used clothes in their household bins.
    
    
  • Purchasing decisions:
    Make sustainable purchases the norm by communicating about buying second-hand, renting, borrowing, repairing as opposed to buying new and considering products that are built to last and to be easily refurbished.
    
    
  • Choosing suppliers carefully:
    Communicate about consumer’s power to purchase or subscribe from responsible suppliers (e.g. for energy, use suppliers that supply renewable energy).

B2B: To identify opportunities to include climate-related content, consider the whole value chain and the broader context related to the products/services you’re writing about:

• Consider the value chain:
  • upstream value chain (e.g. how product and packaging raw materials are sourced and manufactured / the importance of assessing and auditing suppliers against environmental and social criteria)
  • use of the product or service (e.g. how is the product/service used by businesses? Are there some opportunities to optimise and reduce the GHG emission associated with the use of the product/service?)
  • downstream value chain (i.e. can the product be repaired, recycled/recovered at end of life? can waste be reduced?)
  • logistics (e.g. promote organisations that use electric vehicles for their distribution)
    
    
• Contextual information
  • Regulations (e.g. how regulations may impact the sustainability of a product, service or organisation)
  • innovations that have the potential to reduce GHG emissions and that can help businesses meet their sustainability targets
  • new business models (e.g. leasing models)
  • market and competition (e.g. consider talking about brands’ sustainable strategies and targets)
  • priorities (e.g. communicate about what impacts the most when talking about circularity, GHG emissions)
  • showcase best practices (e.g. products, services or businesses that reduce their GHG emissions)
  • wider sustainability topics that are also linked to GHG emission reductions: e.g. biodiversity, ethical sourcing
    
    

Once an opportunity to communicate on climate and/or more sustainable lifestyles is identified, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the key ‘sustainability’ message that you’d like the reader to remember?
  • How this message can be communicated so that it is relevant, clear and inspiring to my audience?
  • Can I use visual communication to reinforce my message? Can I use pictures to convey a positive message?
  • Is my message actionable? i.e. is it clear to the readers what steps they can take to be more sustainable?
  • Does the content meet the Content Guiding Principles?

For digital content, use your CMS to tag and track the level of content and measure the impact of your sustainable messages. A list of suggested tags is provided on the next page.

For non-digital content, consider developing a tracking system that works for your organisation. To start with it may be as simple as having an Excel spreadsheet that capture, for example, all live events and whether they covered any climate-related topics.