The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched their own enquiry into this subject. The CMA have produced new Guidance on misleading environmental green claims, in collaboration with the ASA.
The Advertising Association launched their Ad Net Zero initiative. The plan commits the ad industry to influence the creative content of ads to promote more sustainable messages. Ad Net Zero have worked to produce a wide array of tools and materials that will help advertisers in their work towards creating ad campaigns that contribute towards reducing carbon emissions. The ASA has contributed training material about our rules to their online training module, which has been made widely available to advertising industry professionals.
The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), has issued global guidance on environmental claims at the Global Marketer Week in Athens which details principles and global best practice to help brands ensure that environmental claims are credible to consumers and can be backed up if they are challenged.
The European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) and The International Council for Advertising Self-Regulation (ICAS) were commissioned by WFA to develop global guidance on environmental claims to help marketers advertise responsibly. The guidance represents a consensus across the global industry and industry regulators of what the core elements are to ensuring trustworthy and meaningful environmental claims.
Changethebrief is a partnership between agencies of every size and type – media, creative, design, PR – and their clients, learning and acting together to directly address the challenge of the climate crisis by promoting sustainability via every channel available to them.
Ad Green unites the advertising industry to eliminate the negative environmental impacts of production.
Ecoeffectiveness is a tool, sponsored by the Institute for Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) that proposes an alternative measure in the examination of advertising effectiveness – analysing and tracking the carbon impact of ad campaigns.
Planet Pledge is a World Federation of Advertiser framework designed to galvanise action from marketers to promote and reinforce attitudes and behaviours which will help the world meet the challenges laid out in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
The British Retail Consortium’s Better Retail Better World campaign commits the retail industry to build a fairer, more sustainable economy in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. One of the critical goals determined by us and our stakeholders is Climate Action. Their Climate Action Roadmap is the framework to help guide the industry to net zero.
They have also produced a Practical Guide for Retailers. This guide lays the foundations for a key element of their Climate Action Roadmap; helping customers to live low-carbon lifestyles. It is designed for retailers, to help them understand their customer, why they might – or might not – change their behaviours, and what retailers can do to encourage such change and how to implement those changes.
Purpose Disruptors aim to create a visible, large scale movement within the industry, working together to make the necessary transition to meaningfully tackle climate change.”
The UK hosted the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow on 31 October – 13 November 2021. The COP26 summit brought parties together to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
ICC is the institutional representative of more than 45 million companies in over 100 countries. The ICC Framework for Environmental Marketing Communications (ICC Framework) provides added guidance in response to the growing complexity of environmental or “green” marketing claims. The Framework provides a helpful approach for advertising industry stakeholders to use in developing and analysing environmental claims, consistent with general principles of the ICC Advertising and Marketing Communications Code and specific guidelines in Chapter D on environmental claims.