Last updated on 11th October 2024

What do we mean by ‘greenwashing’?

Greenwashing is the practice of making an organisation, their products or their activities appear more sustainable - or aligned with action to address the Climate and Nature Emergency - than they actually are.

Greenwashing can include:

• making false or misleading claims
• setting goals/targets without taking the action needed to reach them
• over-emphasising examples of good practice to divert attention from harmful practices
• diverting responsibility for mitigating negative impacts, for example onto a company’s customers (1)
• delaying mitigation of, or making inaccurate claims to be ‘compensating’ for, environmentally damaging practices e.g. through reliance on unproven/inadequate ‘offsetting’ services or the promise of possible future technologies.
• co-opting terms and practices (eg. regenerative agriculture, nature-based solutions etc.) - committing to them in name only, and not in practice.

We have an imperative to guard against greenwashing, because practices such as those listed above serve to dilute and delay the essential and urgent action required to safeguard life on Earth. AimHi Earth and its team members are committed to avoiding greenwashing; this means that we won’t knowingly participate in greenwashing ourselves, nor will we knowingly facilitate greenwashing by the organisations we work with.

What is AimHi Earth’s role?

We provide climate and nature science training as a basis to support organisations and individuals to make positive transitions in order to manage risks, adapt and evolve. Our content is built from the most trusted, reliable and unbiased sources available (2), and we strive to create and deliver our content such that it is engaging and empowering, without compromising on telling the full story. This requires that we share difficult truths about the scale and interconnectedness of the threats to our climate, to Nature and to people, the urgent need for genuinely transformative action, as well as what that does - and doesn’t - look like. We will never knowingly include in our training anything false or misleading.