The new test for green claims: Can your business prove what it says?

With just days to go before Europe’s new rules on environmental claims come into force, the focus will shift from simply assessing what businesses are saying towards more robustly interrogating what they can substantiate with credible evidence. Now more than ever, companies need to champion science, not spin, in their external communications to avoid accusation of greenwashing, reputational and financial penalties and, in the extreme, risking their license to operate. 

On 27 September 2026, the E.U.’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive or ‘EmpCo’ will become law. It represents a significant tightening of the rules around how businesses communicate environmental performance to consumers: 

• Sustainability labels will face tighter controls. Generic claims such as “green,” “eco-friendly” or “climate friendly” will be prohibited unless a company can demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to that claim.  
• Claims about future environmental performance need clear, objective and publicly available commitments, a detailed implementation plan and regular independent verification.  
• Claims suggesting that a product has a neutral, reduced or positive greenhouse gas impact because of carbon offsetting are specifically prohibited.  
• Furthermore, businesses cannot market products or an entire company as environmentally beneficial where the evidence relates only to one aspect of it. 

This regulation has been on the horizon for some time. Member States were required to transpose EmpCo by 27 March this year. Germany, for example, enacted amendments to its consumer-contract and unfair competition legislation in February; Ireland followed with its Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Regulations in April. From 27 September, enforcement sits within existing national consumer protection systems, with cross-border cooperation available through the E.U.’s Consumer Protection Cooperation network.  

There is significant impetus for companies to get this right: companies that commit widespread E.U. consumer law infringements can face maximum fines of at least 4% of their annual turnover in the Member States affected. 

And regulators are not starting from a blank page. Italy’s competition authority fined Shein €1 million in August 2025 over misleading environmental claims. In the U.K., where a separate but increasingly stringent consumer protection regime applies, the CMA now has powers to impose fines of up to 10% of worldwide turnover for infringements of consumer law. 

But this isn’t only about mitigating losses. There is a significant market advantage afforded to businesses who can communicate accurately and robustly around their environmental performance. According to Kantar’s Most Valuable Global Brands 2026 report, 10% of the value of the world’s top 100 brands can be directly attributed to their reputation on sustainability. Doing good isn’t enough — they have got to be known to do this. ERM MCA’s 2025 Global Eco Pulse® research finds that 67% of people around the world say a company’s environmental reputation influences their buying decisions. 

And according to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, more than half of people believe a company that is silent is either concealing bad practice, or simply not doing enough. So to those executives who question whether it might just be better not to communicate at all, be warned: There is credibility as well as commercial advantage at risk. 

The data tells a more complicated story than “greenwashing is rising.”

ERM’s media monitoring analysis of the past year shows that the potential reach of coverage reporting on greenwashing has risen from 45 million to 909 million — an increase of 525%, showing interest in this topic is growing exponentially. Yet the tone is strikingly restrained: 93.1% of coverage was neutral, with 3.82% positive. 

That matters because visibility is growing without necessarily being driven by outrage. Greenwashing is increasingly being discussed as a mainstream question of regulation, evidence, corporate conduct and risk. 

Findings from environmental, social and corporate governance data science company, RepRisk, adds another layer to this story. Its latest annual analysis found that greenwashing risk has been declining in the E.U. since 2023, even as it rose in the U.K. and U.S. But lower incidence does not mean lower exposure. Its previous global study found a 12% decline in the number of companies linked to greenwashing while high-risk cases increased by more than 30%. RepRisk also warned that growing regulatory scrutiny may be encouraging greenhushing: companies choosing to say less about sustainability rather than risk saying the wrong thing. 

It is clear that some sectors remain particularly exposed. RepRisk identified 294 banking and financial-services companies with greenwashing risks in 2025, up 19% on the previous year. That is important because banks, investors and buyers increasingly sit between sustainability claims and capital. 

Buyers are rightly asking: What happens if this claim is wrong? 

This is where greenwashing stops being a marketing issue. ERM’s own 2026 Annual Trends Report identifies greenwashing as a continuing reputational risk and notes that more than 2,700 environmental-claims cases had been filed globally by early 2025 — more than twice the number in 2020. ERM MCA’s 2025 Global Eco Pulse® consumer research tells the other side of the story: 84% of surveyed U.S. consumers believe companies would not protect the environment unless required by law. 

We are therefore seeing sustainability communications enter conversations that historically belonged to legal, technical or financial due diligence. That is exactly where communications expertise should be. 

Not because communications teams should polish a claim after the fact, but because they understand something technically specialised teams can sometimes miss: what an audience will reasonably understand the claim to mean. 

A technically defensible datapoint can become a misleading headline. A valid improvement in one part of a product can become an unjustified claim about the whole. A legitimate long-term ambition can become a promise the available evidence cannot yet support. This is why the answer is not better copy. It is better integration between sustainability science, data, finance, legal, disclosure and communications. 

With 27 September fast approaching, four questions are worth asking:

• Can we prove the claim? Not approximately — but with an identifiable evidence trail. 
• Does the evidence support what people will understand us to be saying? 
• Are the assumptions, boundaries and qualifications visible enough to matter? 
• Finally, were communications specialists involved early enough to challenge the claim rather than simply approve the wording? 

Because increasingly, the risk does not begin when somebody writes the wrong sentence. It emerges much earlier — when the evidence, the business decision and the story stop lining up.